Hello roon community and KEF LS50 Wireless II owners! I thought it might be helpful to have a separate Roon Ready thread now that our speakers are finally up and running with Roon. I have been streaming since this morning and they sound amazing. I am so glad that the speakers have been finally roon certified.
Here are some FAQ from earlier:
If your speakers have updated to version 1.7 but are still showing as not yet roon certified, then restart your roon server.
Don’t forget to enable roon and switch to that zone when streaming!
Everything is resampled based on the interspeaker connection (either wireless or wired).
Now that they are RoonReady, they behave like any other ‘RAAT zone’ would – and can thus be paired with any other RoonReady, Roon Bridge or Roon device (including other LS50WII).
If your speakers are stuck during updating from 1.6 to 1.7, then contact Kef directly. I have contacted them personally prior and have always received timely responses.
There are now default Kef sound settings enabled while streaming based on how you setup your LS50WII’s. e.g. distance from wall, if you have a sub, or if you have selected a particular make of sub. You may need to adjust some settings based on your particular tastes when it comes to activating the sub.
5 If firmware is stuck, follow the firmware recovery procedure (after sending a service log through the form in settings):
• Unplug the power cables of both primary and secondary speaker
• Connect the inter-speaker cable between primary and secondary speaker - make sure it is connected in the correct "To P/S" port
• Wait 60s
• Plug in back the power cables to Primary and Secondary speaker
• The firmware update will restart and should complete the update
Do note that updating firmware with the speakers connected wirelessly can take a little bit longer.
I have to admit I’ve never used HQPlayer, either on its own or with Roon. What I would say is if you’re using the upsampling feature of HQPlayer, I’d probably set it to match the method of interspeaker connection (24/96 for wireless, 24/192 for wired) so you aren’t resampling twice. No point oversampling it in HQPlayer IMHO. But give it a play.
Hi @Pierre_Masse i use HQPlayer with my LS50WII. Upsampling to 768 PCM sounds amazing, very natural with great dynamics. I feed the LS50WII via AUX-IN, so the analog signal from the external DAC will get redigiticed to 192/24 internally in the Speaker-Electronics, but, nevertheless, soundwise you can up the ante a bit with such a solution if you are willing to spend the roundabout 600€ for HQPLayer, DAC and NAA and if you are able to hide all the cables and fiddle with additional boxes, 2 Remotes etc.
But all in all it goes against the concept and Target-Audience of the LS50Wireless II’s. I needed a Headphone Amp for my Sennheisers and used this construct as an interim-solution because it took so long until the LS50’S became RoonReady.
I still might continue to use HQPlayer with the SMSL M500 with my KEFs, but I guess I will use the now enabled Roon-Ready LAN-Connection at least 60-75% alone for convenience and perfect integration into Roon. In the coming weeks I will sit down and compare the RoonReady Sound with the Sound of my DAC-Solution with a few different tracks.
I will look forward to that. Basically you will be comparing the built-in KEF “Roon Ready” electronics and their integrated DAC against a possibly better digital front end which will still be passing through KEFs DAC.
One way or another we go through KEFs DAC and in the case of the analog input through their ADC and then their DAC. I am not saying that it will not sound really great but there are some tradeoffs for the simplicity and convenience of an integrated solution.
I hope that others will weigh in with listening notes comparing the built-in Roon to other scenarios.
Is Roon upsampling everything to 24/192 before it sends the audio to the LS50w2? Or is it just telling me that the KEFs are upsampling?
I’m relatively new and don’t know how to interpret this signal path…
I would rather listen to the native format, whether it be 44.1 or 192, but I can’t figure out how to turn this off. With other devices, the audio is delivered natively or downsampled as necessary.
That’s happening in the LS50W2. The signal path is a chronological sequence, so anything after where it says the endpoint is done by the endpoint, anything before is done in the Core.
How does anyone speak, on the phone, to a KEF rep, in re the purchase of a Roon ready LS50 Wireless 2. I want one that is Roon Ready without any updates required. There is no technical dept. listed at Kef USA, E mails only. What is the starting serial number of the Roon Ready LS50 Wireless 2’s ? Help!
I went through this with my Mark 2’s and it seems that they only have email support. I had limited luck with that. Between the “Roon Ready” marketing ploy, bugs with the Second Source function and insufficient tech support I eventually returned mine to the vendor and went back to separates. I do have a pair of LSX’s and love them for TV.
BTW. I had also looked into Hegel but they have been promising “Roon Ready” “Coming Soon” far longer than even KEF.
If you are using roon then I am assuming you have WIFI setup as well. The wireless 2’s can update wirelessly so updating to the most recent firmware is a pretty easy deal.
Are you saying that Kef has sent software updates to owners of older KEF LS50 wireless II’s that make them Roon Ready? Is there any shop that has a Roon Ready pair, brand new, for sale? Where?
Yes, the firmware update which makes the speakers roon ready has been released. The speakers will automatically update if they are connected to your WIFI. There is nothing more you need to do after that.
It would be best do a Google or use the dealer search on the Kef home site to search the local speaker shops that sell Kef products by you and reach out to them to see if they could assist you in your purchase. It might be possible that they could do the update in their shop for you, but you would have to contact them first and see if that could be arranged. I have included the link below for the local dealer search.
Aye, the firmware updates are done ‘over-the-air’ through the app. As long as they’re connected to the internet, the speakers will check their firmware version against the one on the server, and if the one on the server is newer, it will notify you and guide you through the process. It’s really just a case of pressing a couple of buttons in the app and waiting for a little bit while it updates. Think of it like a Windows update.
But as @Cookster says, you could ask your local dealer to do so before they ship it out, I’m sure many would oblige (as long as they factory reset it afterwards to make it easier for you to connect it onto your own network). But I wouldn’t really worry about it - there will be more firmware updates in the future, would be useful to go through the process so you know what it does in future.
As you’ve had roon ready versions of the speakers for longer than most of us, I wonder if you could offer any advice, based on your experience, about how to set up roon for the best balance between sound quality and network stability over wifi. in particular, I’d like to know if you see any point in upsampling in Roon above 192KHz or using DSD if the speakers are going to resample to 192KHz/24 bit PCM anyway.
