KEF LS50WII and no sound on startup

Hi,

since fw 1.6 i have the following issues:

On startup there is no sound output from the speakers for round about 1min.
This means i can see on the tv the movie running but i don’t hear anything.
After some time (1min) the sound is starting. If i switch off and on the loudspeakers via kef control app the sound starts immediately.

It looks like on wakeup from standby the ls50wii forgets to activate the dsp.

This behaviour is also valid for fw 1.7.

My setup is:

  • LS: kef ls50 wii
  • TV: LG-W65PLA8
  • Connection: HDMI set as second wakeup source

I tried the following workarounds:

  • A reset of the ls i already tried without success
  • kef support stated unknown behaviour and that i‘m the only known case with this issue
  • and thats why i‘m asking here … no solution available and also not planned

BR

Arnd

Hello @ArndH,

I recommend reaching out to KEF or your dealer about this issue, in all likelihood it’s unrelated to Roon.

-John

Hello John,

thank you for your statement. I agree that it is not Roon related. But Kef support i‘ve already contacted with no result … so love it or leave it … is my current opinion.

Therefore if someone can proivde me an alternative support contact or any idea ….

It is simply annoying to wait 1 min on startuo till you can hear something.

How did you contact and where are you based? I have zero access to the customer service side of things, so I can’t look directly at anything for you, but I can try and see what’s going on.

If you haven’t, when you recreate the issue, pop into the settings section of the app, and there’s the support form. That will attach the speaker logs, which can be looked at by the developer team. They’ll be able to dive into it and hopefully see what’s causing the issue. On the face of the description, it seems to me that the handshaking is just taking a bit of time to happen, but then I’m not a developer/coding/software person. If you have another television you can try it with, if it isn’t too much hassle, and let me know if it happens there as well, that would be great.

2 Likes

My Mark 2’s had a lot of problems with KEF’s “second wakeup source” way before they got around to getting Roon working.

The KEF’s seem to be programmed to look for a signal that the sources I had did not provide. One source was my new Sony Bravia 2020 TV, the other was the output from my main listening system which came from a pro audio Mutec USB to SPDIF converter. These are mainstream, well designed devices, not boutique, unique, custom units. In the end I disabled that feature and just used the remote to switch sources and to turn the speakers on/off.

Service requests to KEF Support had little follow through from information they asked for and I gathered. They never return helpful information to solve the issue. This was over a period of 6 months. I was left with the feeling that KEF rushed these speakers to market before Christmas after making a decision to let the purchasers beta test.

In the end I sent back my KEFs to the vendor as they did not meet my needs in terms of working advertised features or for sound quality relative to the equipment they replaced. It is pretty hard to make a Swiss army knife device!

I sincerely hope that you have better luck.

Hello Ben,

sorry for the late reply. In the meantime … i arranged somehow with the behaviour.
I‘m located in germany and had already direct contact with the support.

Feedback from there was:

  • HDMI is an industry standard which is interpreted by each company on its own … therefore it is nearly impossible to provide a solution which fits to all tvs on the market.
  • second comment i‘m the only known person which has this issue … therefore there is no further support possible … somehow a contradiction to the above statement from mourip
  • a second tv is a good idea … but it is somehow with a huge effort involved and as the tv is from the same manufacturer (LG) i won‘t expect too much from this use case
  • and as long as there is no support from KEF planned/provided/motivated … wasted effort from my side

Basically it would be very simple to collect the needed informations from the speakers. Collecting a log/tracefile during startup with all wakeup events … fixing such a issue would be an overseeable effort for KEF. I really dont understand why they dont take this problems as a chance to improve their product instead of ignoring users.

I would be motivated to support as the LS50WII are a great product. But they could be better … :-).

Now … i live with the waiting time and enjoy afterwards the sound … knowing that there additional problems like:

  • connecting a bluetooth headphone to the tv leads to hdmi reconnection events on the kefs which disconnects my headphones … i always have to disconnect the hdmi cable from the kefs if i want to use my tv with bluetooth
  • The ipad app is not in landscape format available
  • the ipad app do not support ethernet (wired) connections

But in total … the sound is great :-).