How does Duke's big home audio speakers compare smaller, active constant directivity speakers like these (maybe the best of the breed)?
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/kii-audio-three
The Kii Three looks like a very innovative design, with a lot of good things going on in a very compact package. Kudos to Bruno for giving such high priority to the radiation pattern. It looks to me like Bruno's radiation pattern will result in the reverberant sound having the same spectral balance as the first-arrival sound, which is imo highly desirable, and s practically unheard-of in such a small speaker.
My current philosophy is the two-streams paradigm, which is this: You start with a very clean first-arrival sound, then have minimal early reflections, and then have a spectrally-correct, relatively late-onset stream of reverberant energy. The key points are tight radiation pattern control (along with deliberate aiming of the speakers) to minimize early reflections, and then deliberately adding more spectrally-correct, late-onset energy to the reverberant field. This paradigm is based on the research of David Griesinger into concert hall acoustics, and is anecdotally validated every time a pair of Maggies or Quads or Sound Labs is pulled out into the room at least five feet and the improvement in realism is significant.
So it looks to me like the Kii Three's first-arrival sound measures very good, then his pattern is pretty wide so there will be a fair amount of early reflections, but at least they will be spectrally correct, which imo is a huge improvement over most small speakers. I don't doubt the claims made about cardioid bass either, but I think a distributed multisub system will outperform it, though at the expense of using up a lot more real estate.
The tweeter on the Kii Three looks like the SEAS DXT. I spent some time with that tweeter, and it measures extremely well off-axis. The problem ime was that it sounded edgy at high levels. I think this is because the DXT waveguide uses diffraction to help achieve radiation pattern uniformity, and diffraction tends to sound harsh at high sound pressure levels. There is a slight time delay between the "clean" output and the diffracted energy, and the ear becomes increasingly sensitive to that sort of slight time delay as the sound pressure level goes up.
If you will be at RMAF this year, come by Room 3002 in the Tower. And bring your aural memory of the Kii room! I think we can give it some competition.
