What is the room temperature typically @Abdul_Samad?
Ambient temp is around 24 degrees Celsius.
Well my pair started making a weird noise when playing a test tone down from 50hz to 40 and under. Sounds like the speaker driver is making a rattling or buzzing sound.
Don’t remember ever hearing that sound before, is this normal?
Unmute the video to hear the sound
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The website i used in the video was https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ and the kefs were set to52% in the kef app and 100% in windows.
I’m new to Roon and have had LS50W’s for a couple of months. They were bought to replace a Marantz HD:Amp1 which died just outside the 2 year warranty period. Marantz were totally unhelpful and the repair cost was £450. The upshot of all this is that I decided to stump up for a 5 year warranty on the LS50W’s. Time will tell but perhaps this was a smart move! Latest addition is a pair of LSX’s which are working pretty well with Roon too.
Does anyone know why the KEF LS50 Wireless price has gone from $2199 to $2499 in the U.S.? I was considering buying a set, but missed the sale in the last couple of months in 2019 (they were priced at $1899), so now it’s really hard to justify that full price. My guess is that the price boost is dues to U.S./China tariffs – is this true?
My assumption with last year’s sale is that KEF were getting rid of their stock of current LS50w’s and new versions were around the corner.
I have my LS50 Wireless for about 6 months and they are wonderful. No Problems so far. if they don’t behave, unplugging the power cord solved all problems so far. I added a JL Audio Sub and I am very happy. My LSX are great too, but one cannot compare to the “big ones” 
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How did you integrate the sub?
the ls50w have a sub out and i control the sub volume over the kef app. I tried a lot but in the end i don`t mess with the kef’s DSP and just manually adjusted the sub. seems to be the best sound so far. I also upsample to 24bit 192khz and I think they sound way better than 16bit…
I have my LS50W enabled with high-pass mode on and set both on 80Hz. This and a little convolution between 20 and 100 Hz gives me a clean and deep bass. It sounds like a really big system… and I know how a big system sounds, because before the Kefs a had a pair of huge Arendal Tower 1723! These Kefs however, sound much more refined.
Huge and mighty indeed! I exchanged my VAIC Standard with these little beauties - the sub was needed anyway. I am very happy and I think it is little money for a LOT of sound.
Hi guys.
A potential buyer of a used set of KEF LS50Ws here. My local hifi vendor offered me a pair, which has been used for 20 months, so 4 months of warranty left. The price of the set is 1250 euros (or 1050 pounds) and the units are in a mint condition, from the outside at least.
Reading this thread, there seem to be quite a bit of technical problems, but I would wager, that the set is quite popular as well, so that has to be taken into account.
I have two questions to make myself more comfortable with purchasing something used:
- does the set have any safety feature if a sudden spike of volume/bass is introduced, to preserve the integrity of drivers - or the other way around, can the set be worn down to exhaustion by just using them
- are there any “sound scenarios” I could test, to confirm the drivers (or other critical components) are indeed ok?
Best regards.
Here’s my experience of almost a month with these:
I’ll break this down into 4 parts as this is a 4-in-1 product:
- Streamer: I think this is the weakest part. On wifi it’s a disaster, I got tired of troubleshooting and have completely given up on using wifi. I exclusively use them on USB which is more stable but still have problems. Right now I am struggling with getting them to take remote control transport commands, which they stopped doing since yesterday and no amount of restarts seems to solve this.
Also even though they are advertised as DLNA capable, there’s no way to send a wifi stream from a DLNA media library on a computer; the only way to stream wifi to them, other than Roon is via the mobile app. Which does not work - i don’t need this since I use Roon, but every time I try to stream via WiFi from the KEF stream app it does not work. It simply doesn’t start playback. So basically the WiFi capability is useless, you can ignore it for now. Maybe they come up with a firmware update that fixes these things… - DAC can’t really comment since there’s no way to compare with other DAC’s, but maybe worth mentioning that if you use Tidal there’s no MQA decoding, you’ll get just the first unfold by Roon Core.
- Amp - I think this is really good, at least theoretically since you have the “perfect match” between speaker and amp, DSP crossovers, etc
- Speakers (sound) I was in love with them for 3 weeks as they were better than my old system (BW701+HK650amp) until I bought a pair of Adam Audio T5V for the kitchen. The Adams are 250EUR and in my very humble opinion they sound better than the KEF. Compared them extensively during the weekend and the Adam come out on top in my preference (driven by a Raspberry Pi + Audioquest Black)
As a general useability score they get a 1 out of 5 from me. Source selection is ridiculous since you don’t know what source you selected unless you stand up to watch the panel (or use the app), the remote doesn’t work (at the moment, for me) at even when it does it is poorly designed as you have to look at it to know where the buttons are. Connectivity has problems. Sound is nice, but you can get good or better at lower price points again this is my very uneducated opinion.
Bottom line - to pay nearly 2000EUR for these you need to really be crazy about how they sound and have them in a setup that works around all these useability and connectivity issues. We live in an age when unbelievably good HiFi products exist at all price ranges so nobody should have to put up with the kind of issues this has at this price point.
I am currently trying to work out a return with the dealer (I am out of the return period) or consider selling them at a loss.
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I do agree with the wifi-part as Roon does loose connection all the time, however soundwise I cannot share you opinion. My son does have the same Adam speakers in his little studio and we have tried the Kefs in the same studio… the Kefs blew the Adams away on all parts, mids, highs, bass, definition, imaging, details, power… in every part they are way better than the Adams. The Adams aren’t bad but the Kefs are simply the better speakers.
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I have had my LS50 Wireless speakers for a month. They communicate with my Nucleus over my wireless network. They occasionally lose their connection so I am going to run an ethernet cable between the two. So far I have been really impressed. I took time and effort setting up my room just right. They are precise, powerful and really tell you all there is to know about the recordings. I am amazed how good some older recordings sound and by the same token how poor some modern ones are.
Having sold my old Rotel amp and Kef passive speakers I now have nothing to plug my headphones into. Any thoughts? Is it possible to plug a Chord Mojo into the USB socket of the Nucleus? I presume I could plug the Mojo into my Mac when I am using it as an endpoint.
The Kef LS50 Wireless speakers are really tremendous. They have their frailties but the sound they are capable of producing is wonderful.
Apparently transport control in Roon is not supported for the LS50 wireless. Have you guys been aware of this? Is anyone able to use transport controls by remote in Roon?
Hi, I own the KS50w for 2 years now, and during this time, they came back from an international moving with a small dent, and they did not work. So I took them to the dealer and they repaired them with cost for the obvious damage (the insurance company paid for the repair); it took some time to repair because they changed the whole motherboard and it was ordered from the UK. This was around 6 months ago, now, I am having a different issue; the right speaker seems to have a DAC or dither issue and some times has noise, high frequency distortion or mutes completely for less than a second. Maybe it is related to the previous repair, anyway I am taking them back to repair.
I now have the exact same issue, and am beyond warranty, so I hope they can repair them.
They work wirelessly for me with roon with no issues.
Transport control included?
Mine, I had the board replaced 7 months ago because of the three blinking lights issue, and now I have the high frequency distortion, intermittent muting and hiss noise from the master (right) speaker. So back to the dealer. To be fair the board they replaced I assumed was the left one, but now I will have to ask them if it was only that one or if they changed both boards.