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The KAD K7s render music purely rather than brightly. If music were water, the K7s render water from a cool, clear mountain lake. Nevertheless, you get the full scope of the sound.
The track “A Caged Bird / Imitations of Life” from Cinematic Orchestra showcases a full sounding soundstage with volcanic deep palpable rumbling of the bass at the end. Roots Manuva’s specific voice is delineated against the wall of layered sound. Don’t expect a big, roaring bass, but rather a cannonball fired at you. You hear everything, but really everything.
This is where the purity comes in: you get an overwhelming amount of information at you, while still keeping a coherent picture. Despite the level of detail, when you play a rock album you hear a band playing, not an individual guitar, drum and bass as some detail systems do.
As if you were there in the studio
The stereo image of the KAD K7 is not overly large in the chosen setup, but it is precisely defined and extremely stable. You can almost see the 3D stage on which the musicians are standing. The stage has no sidewalls or ceiling, but the dimensions can be pinpointed in the air in front of you.
Actually, it is more like a studio space. More than once the feeling of being in the studio, during the recording, came over me; the sound and color of the instruments, the feeling of being close to them, the lifelike quality.
Reverberation or extinction of tones is short, so that you don’t notice many acoustics of the environment in which the recording was made. This partly causes the “as if you were there in the recording room” feeling.
A good example is the track “I Can’t Quit You Baby” from the Led Zeppelin box set. The guitar and drum work can be followed exactly. What Jimmy Page gets out of his guitar here, his unparalleled timing and rubato, is astounding. Every note, every movement on the string can be followed, through the direct, unadorned sound.
Musical revelations
That music is a powerful medium was proven by the album “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. It provided your author with a strong flashback. In your room in your parents’ house, your Philips boombox, with detachable speakers, set up on your desk, cassette tape in it and then, in the dark, lying on your bed, get totally absorbed in the music. That feeling came up again, listening to the album on the KAD K7.
Another ear opener was Keith Jarrett’s “Köln Concert.” The K7 gives weight in the individual notes and in the sound of the grand piano. All keystrokes can be clearly followed, but more importantly, you can hear the intention with which the keys are struck. Because of the speed of the speaker, it never becomes a brew of sound. As if you were sitting on stage next to Jarrett. The result is a great music experience.
Lost in the caverns of the orchestra
Because you’re close to the music, which is rendered in great detail, this works well with music that tolerates it. With busier or larger work, think orchestras, you lose the atmosphere. You’re sitting with a magnifying glass between the melody lines. If you want to know how a conductor approaches a score you have here the installation that exposes that. If you prefer to let the whole thing come over you from a somewhat greater distance, that becomes more difficult.
In Prokofiev’s third symphony, a great deal is poured over you as a listener. It is a complex work and that complexity becomes audible in every detail. Listening to this work then takes a lot. In Vaughan Williams’s “Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tellis,” the coherence of the various string groups holds up, the intention with which it is played is palpable, yet it appeals more to a rational emotion and less to the feeling that the ebb and flow of the music usually evokes.
Oh, that voice!
The rendering of the human voice is second to none. Again: purity, no embellishments. It is impressive because it does not try to be impressive. It is the voice, depicted very precisely and with harmonic overtones that you usually only hear when someone is singing next to you in the same room. You can even hear how the singer moves relative to the microphone if you start listening intently.
As in the cover “Hey Ma” by Jamie Cullum, or the album “Almost Bangor” by Novastar. Both examples are the singer-songwriter singing directly to you, with stripped-down accompaniment complementing the voice as the centerpiece.
When things get a little grander, as in Stevie Wonder’s “Ashes” and with Etta James in “I’d rather go blind” from the Live in Montreux album, the K7s show a more dual nature. On the one hand you miss depth in the soul and gospel, it doesn’t swing, on the other hand the voices are rendered very precisely and on a human scale.