Bryston Mini A ($1665 per pair) vs Kef LS50 Meta ($1500 per pair)
I hear you have roughly $2k to spend on some stand mount speakers. Of course they will sound better on stands than they will on a bookshelf. You want to hear the music the speaker is intended to deliver, not the extra ringing and rumble of your etergere.
Let’s dive in and address the little elephant in the room. The Kef LS50 has gotten massive press since it came out in 2011. I’ve heard them and even ordered some for a few customers that had to have them, and only them.
The press has been overly friendly to the LS50. Kef is a marketing monster. They advertise everywhere and subsequently garner loads of attention. As for the speaker itself, LS50 sounds quite crisp- and BRIGHT. Despite what I read, I hear asperity- without much warmth, much less deep bass. Yet crisp is better than foggy, bright is better than dull. All told, I can see why someone might buy LS50- if you want its colorful facade and hadn’t heard a fuller ranged, better balanced competitor- like the Bryston Mini A.
Let’s go deeper. Kef has upgraded the LS50 to the LS50 Meta. Meta is short for Metamaterial Absorption Technology. This is a sales buzzword that means, they’ve installed a little plastic maze disc behind the tweeter diaphragm to minimize the ringing or sizzle of the original LS50. Um, seriously? Wow!
Reviewer Alan Sircom of Hi-Fi+ is an argute writer I read regularly and think well of. Allan comments that the original LS50 is “rough edged at times, especially when playing classical, folk or jazz.” Um, well, that’s 99% of what I listen to. How about you? When Allan heard the new Meta version he noted of the original that “the cabinet of the LS50 was singing along with the tweeter. That high frequency sizzle that made the LS50 too exuberant at times is gone.”
What Allan is referring to is EXACTLY what I heard in the first iteration. I’m more than a little chagrined that everyone hasn’t heard it this way, and commented on it concomitantly. In short, when you hear a smoother, fuller ranged speaker like the Bryston Mini A, or Kef Meta, it’s undeniable that the original issue sounded more than a tad thin and bright from day one.
LS50 Meta cabinets are comprised of MDF (sides and rear) and a contoured plastic front baffle- which can be made in a hundred and one colors. Stylish, to be sure. They’re roughly 12h, 8w and 11d. So they’re very small with high Wife Acceptance Factor. Meta is a 2-way that uses a 5” aluminum bass/mid driver with 1” aluminum tweeter – affixed to the center in Uni-Q design. The bass only reaches to about 80Hz. When the bass/mid driver moves, the tweeter has to resonate as well. They’re physically linked together. The SPL is quite low at 85dB. Kef claims impedance at 8 ohms, with a lowest dip of 3.5 ohms. Yet when Stereophile TESTED Meta, the impedance did indeed drop to 1.7 ohms. To be straightforward here, 1.7 ohms and 85dB SPL does not an easy load make!
OK, with all this said, what’s our alternative?
Bryston Mini A $1665 Per Pair
(15.5h, 8.5w, 8.25d, 87dB, 8 ohms)
Bryston’s Mini A is a legit 3-way speaker made in Canada with a 20 freaken year warranty!
It is 3.5” taller than Meta. SO WHAT?! It’s well worth getting a slightly taller speaker to employ a legit 3-way design with significantly extended bass response.
Mini A starts with a 6.5” cast frame, Aluminum woofer. It uses a 3” cast Aluminum midrange driver. It uses a 1” Titanium tweeter. These drivers are housed in a cabinet comprised of 3/4” thick Canadian Rangerwood, which measures 38% more dense than the standard MDF virtually everyone else uses. The Rangerwood cabinets, which incorporate internal bracing, are much more sturdy than MDF and yield performance approaching the prohibitively expensive aircraft grade aluminum enclosures out there.
The tonal balance of Mini A is like all of Bryston’s speakers. It is Steinway smooth! These speakers do not have a grainy, or harsh top end. On a scale of 1-10, the tonal balance is a five, instead of a nine. The dedicated midrange driver helps deliver neutral sound throughout this critical region. The 6.5” woofer gets significantly deeper than a 5, approximately 60Hz, and doesn’t ring the Hades out of the tweeter, because it isn’t physically connected to it, as the Meta design is. Even the feet on Mini A are special. They’re threaded aluminum pucks or spikes. Kef has minuscule rubber discs.
Bryston makes its own speakers, in its own plant in Canada. Bryston does not vendor out this construction. With such intrinsic control, Bryston warranties Mini A and all of its speakers for 20 years! Kef offers a traditional 5 year warranty. Most speaker companies quit supporting parts on their speakers at about the ten year mark. That… isn’t good enough for Bryston.
To summarize, I’m not saying the Meta is a no good, terrible, rotten speaker. I am saying, that I adjure you to look beyond the tidal wave of publicity that Kef can muster, to consider Bryston’s Mini A, which is a speaker I much prefer, and think you will too.