I always wanted to have a nice music system in my house since I was a kid. However, I now finally got the chance to build my own HiFi audio system. After some research and listening to different speakers at my local HiFi stores, I shortlisted the following speakers based on my budget:
- KEF Q350
- Dali Oberon 3
- B&W 607 S2
- Wharfadale Evo 4.2
After some deliberation, I decided I would buy the Kef and the Dali and test it out at my house in person. The local stores here didn’t allow renting the speakers, unfortunately. So, I had to buy the speakers to test them out at my house. Anyway, that’s enough preamble, let’s unbox the beauty now.
It came in a nice KEF box (not Amazon) and had a warning of the weight being more than 15 kgs.
Opening the box, I found the manual, subwoofer insulation foams, and the legs in a ziplock pouch, and of course, the speakers. No cables nor plugs. If you find the speakers too boomy then you can use the insulation foams at the rear. The legs would be hardly 2mm thick stickers that you can stick at the bottom.
A closer look:
Next up, the speaker itself:
Personally, I think all KEF speakers are a beauty mainly because their Uni-Q design makes them so unique aesthetically. Almost all of the other well-known speakers have tweeters separate.
Now, let’s look at the back of the speaker:
Nothing special here but I like the overall build quality etc. These don’t have bi-amping as you can see but it’s not a big deal for me.
Finally, I did some research on cables and I finalized the QED Reference XT40i as I wanted something better than normal cables without breaking the bank. And, these are quite good quality and not too expensive as some of the other very high-end cables. I went with the premium quality banana plugs from HiFiHut and not the Airloc plugs that QED provides so that I have the flexibility to change the plugs later without having to cut the cables short.
The cable and the plugs look like this:
And, I fitted them to the speaker like this:
I know the most ideal way is to remove the red/black caps with a knife or tweezer and insert the banana plug there but I did it this way for some reason (which I don’t want to bore you with).
So, there you go, that’s the KEF Q350.
