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Details: Written by: Dennis Burger; Created: 01 January 2025

Reviewers' Choice In my unboxing blog post for the KEF Q3 Meta bookshelf speaker ($799.99/pair, all prices in USD), I said it felt like a palate cleanser to me in many respects, but here’s a spoiler for you: I wrote those words before I ever cracked the carton and pulled the speakers from their protective packaging. That notion was based purely on my impressions of the company’s speakers, formed mostly at trade shows and based on objective data.

I’ve heard and loved a lot of KEF speakers. But I’ve never reviewed one—not a proper review, at any rate. At least not that I can remember. I tested the E305 home-theater system for Wirecutter a bazillion years ago. But a proper evaluation of a proper pair of proper KEF bookshelf speakers or towers? I’ve long had to defer to writers at other publications who had more seniority or experience or more familiarity with the brand.

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So, in a sense, getting my paws on the Q3 Meta in my own listening room was not merely a way of recalibrating my ears after spending a few months with different speakers that had quite distinctive voices, but also a chance to get to know what KEF can do for this sort of money.

Blah blah whatever. You don’t care, right? What you care about are the details. So let’s get down to brass tacks. The Q3 Meta is, despite being the second-smallest speaker in the ninth-generation Q Series lineup, a thicc boi measuring 14.1″H × 8.3″W × 12″D.

Mind you, that’s not massive when you consider the entire landscape of speakers, but it is bigger than I think some people would expect for a two-way bookshelf model with a single coaxial driver array. The array in question is a 12th-generation Uni-Q with a 6.5″ aluminum-cone midrange-woofer and a 1″ vented aluminum-dome tweeter with KEF’s Metamaterial Absorption Technology. If you want to learn more about MAT, I think the best place to start is Jorden Guth’s excellent interview with KEF’s Jack Oclee-Brown on the SoundStage! Audiophile Podcast.

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The Q3 Meta is a bass-reflex design with a large rear-firing port, and the company specifies anechoic frequency response as 49Hz to 20kHz (±3dB) with usable in-room bass extension down to 39Hz (-6dB). Amplification requirements are listed as 15 to 150Wpc. Sensitivity is reportedly 87dB (2.83V/1m) and maximum output is specified as 109dB. Nominal impedance is 4 ohms, with minimum impedance listed as 3.2 ohms. The speaker is available in three finishes: Satin Black, Satin White, and Walnut veneer, which my heartbreakingly gorgeous review samples were clad in.

Setting up and dialing in the KEF Q3 Meta

When I pulled the Q3 Meta pair out of the box, the first thing that struck me was a concern that they might not fit on my Monoprice 42838 stands, which are the only speaker stands I own. As you might have seen in my unboxing post, those fears proved to be just barely unfounded.

Thank goodness, too, because the stands allowed me to tinker with placement quite a bit. The speakers didn’t need anything in terms of vertical repositioning. The 32″ stands resulted in a height of 38.5″ to the center of the tweeter, which is a few inches below my ear height. Still, it’s a bit taller than KEF recommends for stand height. But a few minutes of listening revealed vertical dispersion to be so good it didn’t matter. Horizontal spacing and toe-in needed zero thought or consideration. I placed the stands where my reference Paradigm towers normally go, pointed the drivers straight at me as a starting point for positioning, and that was the end of that. There was no need to tweak anything in that respect.

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What I did tinker with a bit was distance from the back of the speakers to the book-laden shelves behind, which I use as a form of organic absorption. The Q3 Metas didn’t sound bad at any distance from the wall, but they rewarded some slight scootching back—toward the wall behind—with better-behaved bass. Bringing them forward a bit certainly didn’t make them sound bad in the slightest, but it resulted in a less-smooth roll-off on the bottom end that you may or may not like.

I’m eager to see what the measurements look like, just to see if they might indicate why this is the case. At any rate, the manual recommends a minimum distance from the back wall of 9″, and I ended up with about 14″ of space behind the speakers.

When I temporarily plugged the ports just to see how that would affect the speakers’ integration with a sub, the front/back placement became much less of a consideration, and that did improve integration when I set a relatively low crossover point of 60Hz. With an 80Hz crossover, it didn’t make nearly as much difference. So, yet again, I’m champing at the bit to see the measurements and learn a bit about why that’s the case.

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All of the above, by the way, is just a taste of the sort of nitpicking you’re going to read throughout this review. No speaker is perfect, mind you, and the odds that a hypothetical perfect speaker would be an $800/pair bookshelf are slim to whatever. But I found myself so immediately smitten with the sound of the Q3 Meta that my brain immediately started to overcompensate and hyper-fixate on any tiny perceived shortcomings. Is that fair? Probably not. I’m just reporting my experiences here.

At any rate, aside from the aforementioned experimentation with a sub, all of my critical listening was done with the Q3 Metas run full-range, driven by my NAD C 3050 integrated amplifier, with the connection between the two coming in the form of SVS SoundPath Ultra speaker cables.

How does the Q3 Meta perform?

I’m double-dipping with my first musical selection this time around—but for good reason, I hope you’ll agree. Last month, I began my review of the Dynaudio Emit 30 loudspeaker by discussing all of the ways in which its distinctive voicing made it difficult for me to connect with “Change,” the first track from King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s album Changes (24-bit/48kHz FLAC, KGLW / Qobuz).

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Listening through the Q3 Metas was a proverbial breath of fresh air. With average SPLs of 80dB and peaks of 89dB or thereabouts, measured from my primary listening position, the tonality and attack of drummer Michael Cavanagh’s tip-tapping hi-hat sounded spot-on. Vocals and instruments had their proper place in the mix, and although I hate leaning on clichés of this sort, I can’t think of a more evocative way of saying it than this: the speakers got the hell out of the way and gave me my music as I expected it to sound.

A few observations that may or may not be recency bias or just excitement over getting to feed my ears a delightfully well-balanced speaker again: I want to say that the Q3 Meta has better presence than other KEF speakers I’ve heard in this price range. It doesn’t sound like a presence peak; it’s simply better and more consistent response in that frequency range, which helps a lot with vocals. Also, I’m normally a big proponent of 2.1-channel systems, even if you’re running towers. But I could totally live with the Q3 Metas on their own, at least in my room.

Mind you, there’s not a lot going on around 40-ish Hz in “Change,” so to confirm that hunch that I could live with them sub-free, I loaded up my go-to bass stress test: Björk’s “Hyperballad” (Post, 16/44.1 FLAC, Atlantic Records / Qobuz). The song prominently features a descending bass line of three notes: D#, D, and C. And although there’s a lot going on with harmonics and subharmonics, to do the mix full justice, you really need bass extension down to ~32.7Hz, which the Q3 Meta doesn’t even claim to do.

And yet, even without the benefit of a sub, the song just worked on the Q3 Metas. Yeah, the bass line was a weensy bit uneven if you want to seriously scrutinize. But I was diligently listening for such problems, and it didn’t bother me a bit. I was drawn into the music so fully that my brain quickly just accepted the variations in amplitude from note to note as a performance choice, not a shortcoming of the speaker.

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Here’s what surprised me even more, though. I’ve heard many an otherwise-fine ported loudspeaker chuff like a choo-choo when trying to deliver the nearly pure-sinewave bass of “Hyperballad,” so one thing I listened for when loading up the song on the Q3 Metas was how much port noise would push its way into the edges of my consciousness. I didn’t have “absolutely freaking none” on my bingo card for this review. I even walked around to the back of the cabinets and put my ear right next to the port as the speaker was slinging out bass notes way deeper than its specifications would indicate it can handle. If there was any port noise, I couldn’t hear it. To me, that’s a big freaking deal.

The best that I could come up with in terms of legitimate criticism of the Q3 Metas while listening to Björk is that when I turned the volume down significantly—around 65dBC average SPLs from my seat, roughly six feet away from the speakers—I felt like I lost more dynamic punch than I’m normally accustomed to losing. Switching to my much larger and much more expensive reference Paradigm Studio 100 v.5 tower speakers and trying to level match as best as I could, I felt like I got a lot of that punch back at lower listening levels.

So there does seem to be a sweet spot with the KEF Q3 Meta in terms of optimal listening levels. But it’s not so narrow a sweet spot as to be a real concern, especially for a speaker at this price point.

That sweet spot does have a ceiling as well as a floor, though. Some of y’all know about my unguilty and unapologetic adoration for the second-greatest pop song of all time: George Michael’s “Freedom ’90!” (Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, 24/44.1 FLAC, Sony Music CG / Qobuz). This is in no sense an audiophile recording. The bass is just barely sufficient in the mix, and the production is pure late-’80s-radio-friendly-unit-shifter. But it’s a great test track for my purposes because I know it so well.

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At sane listening levels—85dBC average SPLs with ~97dB peaks—the Q3s delivered the song in all its glory, with the only nit I could find worth picking being a slight, periodic sizzle that I couldn’t quite identify. But what kind of soulless monster can listen to this song at sane listening levels? Not I.

Crank the volume up to “I need George Michael to exorcise my demons” listening levels, though—let’s call it 90dBC average from six feet away—and Michael’s vocals started to sound quite harsh, especially on the highest notes in the verses. Oddly enough, this was the only track I auditioned that sounded substantially better in a 2.1-channel configuration, despite the lack of deep bass in the mix. Again, I’m super eager to see the measurements and figure out why.

Once more, I need to shout the following from the highest soapbox I can find: the only reason I’m pointing out these minor (IMO) imperfections is because, otherwise, the Q3 Meta does so many things so significantly better than you’d expect a speaker at this price to do. In terms of tonal balance, there’s just nothing to say, except perhaps that when I noticed that slight roughness in George Michael’s voice when I pushed the speakers too hard, this was accompanied by a bit more note-to-note variation in amplitude, as well. Otherwise, it’s wonderfully neutral.

Vertical dispersion is excellent. Horizontal dispersion is excellent. Soundstaging is excellent. Imaging is excellent. And there’s another thing about the Q3 Meta that I think will make a pair of them a great fit for many a modern home: although, as I indicated in the setup section, they seem to interact with the room quite a bit more in terms of bass frequencies, above the Schroeder frequency, as best I can tell, they seem to interact with the room less, which means you’re far less likely, in my estimation, to need to worry about your first reflections.

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I wish I had the time and means to explore that more, but my hunch, based on my limited time with the speakers, is that they’d be excellent for more modern spaces where acoustical treatments of any form are verboten due to interior-design considerations.

That said, they also excelled in my reasonably well-treated room. So there’s not a tradeoff there, as far as I can hear. Overall, given everything I’ve said above, my experience with the Q3 Metas was overwhelmingly positive. The problem I face is explaining why in words. When something doesn’t work, it’s easy to explain why. When something just works, the sound becomes harder to quantify. It simply sounds like the music. And as I wrote and rewrote and deleted and rewrote again all of the above, most of what I deleted boiled down to mere descriptions of the mixing and mastering of the music itself.

What other similar speakers should you consider?

Frankly, I find myself struggling to find oodles of meaningful competition at nearly the same price. One similar speaker I heard a few years ago that stuck with me was the Polk Audio Reserve R200 ($749/pair). I don’t remember it being quite as neutral, but what I did like was a bit of an upper-treble boost that, while inaccurate, gave the perception of a wider and deeper soundstage that I quite liked. I don’t recall the Polk’s bass being nearly so robust, though.

If you know for a fact that you’re going 2.1-channel with your system, the Paradigm Premier 100B ($798/pair) is worth considering. It’s a gorgeous speaker, but I don’t remember its dispersion characteristics being quite as good as the KEF’s, and it’s not something I’d really consider running without a sub. Still, it’s on the very short list of others you should audition.

Ultimately, though, I think I’d be choosing between the KEF and the PSB Imagine B50 ($699/pair) if it were up to me to pick. The B50 kept its composure better at much louder listening levels, and its tonal balance seemed somehow even more neutral, although I don’t remember its off-axis response being as good as that of the Q3 Meta, and it’s nowhere near as beautiful as a piece of audio jewelry, if that’s your bag. Honestly, I’m struggling to figure out how I would pick between them.

TL;DR: Should you buy the KEF Q3 Meta?

Perhaps instead of “I’m struggling to figure out how I would pick between them,” I should have said, “I’m struggling with how I will pick between them,” because once I have room in my budget, I really want to add a pair of reference bookshelf speakers to my setup, so I can compare like to like and stop using my three-way Paradigm towers as the north star during bookshelf-speaker reviews. It seems fairer and is in much better keeping with the 2.1-channel philosophy I preach and should, as such, practice more.

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It’s going to come down to the PSB Imagine B50 and KEF Q3 Meta for me, unless something else comes along in the meantime and blows me away. Thankfully, I don’t have to make that decision anytime soon because I’m not in a financial position to do so. If you are, though, I’ll say this: if aesthetics are more important to you, if you have a room with some nasty first reflections you just can’t treat right now, and/or if you don’t listen at borderline dangerous SPLs, like, ever, you might find that the Q3 Meta is the better pick for you.

I’m eager to hear the Q3 Meta’s bigger bookshelf sibling, the Q Concerto Meta ($1299.99/pair), since I’m picking up on rumors and rumblings that it’s an even better speaker, as it should be for the price. But if your hard budget cap is at $800/pair or thereabouts, the Concerto Meta is way out of reach. The good news is, the Q3 Meta is a stunning value and an absolute delight to listen to, as long as you don’t try to color too far outside the lines when listening.

. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com

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