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The Kii Lifestyle
Hidden behind the beauty of the Kii THREE is an amazing speaker that is small enough to fit easily into modern living spaces. It doesn’t take over your habitat like a huge old audiophile setup, there are no racks, no big towers, no cables to trip over. Instead, there’s intelligence!
Not only do we use current technology to build a modern active speaker system, but we advance technology from the ground up where necessary and we employ it in ways no one has done before. What may appear to be a cute pair of speakers at first sight, is really a powerful audiophile system that effortlessly outperforms all others, regardless of price.
The clarity and detail, the impressive time coherence and most importantly the handling of the room acoustics let the listener dive right into the magical experience of a great record, more so than even the best conventional (passive) setups are able to. All the innovations inside this speaker serve one single purpose: to be more truthful to the music!
Kii brings more music into your life. Let’s face it: buying a second system for daily use because the “big” system is too impractical for background listening was never a solution. Even the best Hi-Fi set should be easy and intuitive to use for anyone in the house. Whenever there’s music on your mind, there should be great music in your home.
Kii Technology
Each Kii THREE contains six channels of DSP, D/A conversion and power amplification. Few companies could pull off such a densely packed design with truly world class performance electronics. But then again, few active speakers are designed by people who have previously turned high end power amplification and digital conversion around.
Each side panel of the THREE holds a 3x250W power amplifier board, designed by Bruno Putzeys using the latest iteration of the Ncore class D technology which he invented for Hypex. Unique to the implementation used in the Kii THREE is a combined voltage/current control loop that goes beyond merely a better amp – it actively improves the distortion performance of the drive units which contributes significantly to the extreme resolution of the speaker.
Naturally, this means that the performance of the AD/DA conversion has to match that of the amps. This task fell to Bart van der Laan who has a long track record designing DSP and converter boards for high-end professional audio equipment. Kii Audio’s implementation is a runaway success: a complete pass through the AD/DA circuitry of the THREE’s signal processing board is entirely inaudible, a feat not duplicated by the most expensive audiophile standalone units.
Alongside the Active Wave Focusing filters the DSP is responsible for keeping the drive units within their safe operating range by gently adapting the filters instead of brutally limiting the signal, allowing the THREE to play significantly louder and cleaner than much bigger traditional designs.
On the input side there is a choice of analogue, digital inputs. All digital inputs are up-sampled and reclocked using Kii’s own jitter rejection algorithm that guarantees actual “bits is bits” audio performance for any digital source.
The electronics package alone sets a milestone. What it does in concert with the unique acoustic design defies imagination. You have to hear it to realise the magnitude of the revolution the Kii THREE represents.
