KEF KAR 690Q's as home speakers?

[BamaJohn]

I have an older pair of KEF's 6x9 "Uni-Q" speakers for the car that sounded wonderful mounted in a sound board at the store where I purchased them. I no longer need them for the car, but was thinking of designing some bookshelf-style ported enclosures for them to use them as home speakers. Requests to KEF for the T/S parameters or box volumes to use have fallen on deaf ears. Has anyone done something like this before? Anybody have advice for how to proceed from idea to design?

[planet10]

Sometimes car drivers can work out just fine... given it is a UniQ i'd definitly be playing wth them... car drivers are typically higher Q so should work in open baffles or some flavour of TL. Getting the T/S parametres measured would give you a good leg up in designing a box.

Got any pictures?

dave

[Jozua]

Hi

I have a unused set of these drivers and have always wanted to box them- and possibly use them as PC speakers but have held back re the lack of technical specs. I have another set in my car and they really sound exceptional with my Soundstream amp. There is no tweeter tizz that you often find with cheap car speakers.

I'd appreciate any box dimensions or info re determining an optimun box size for these speakers.

Jozua

[BamaJohn]

I don't have any pictures available right now, but I'll try to take some after work and post them tomorrow. I need a place to host them--maybe I'll spring for that pbase account now...

I don't have any measurement equipement or know-how to be able to determine T/S parameters for a given driver. Can someone point me to a site that shows how to do it?

Jozua, that's wild--you and I have the same setup. In my Impala SS I had the 690Q's in the rear deck, powered by a Soundstream Reference 405 amp. I'd love to use these in my current car, but it would require too much cutting and custom work--why bother when the holes in my Camaro SS fit 6.5" speakers so well?

[planet10]

Originally posted by BamaJohn
I don't have any pictures available right now, but I'll try to take some after work and post them tomorrow. I need a place to host them--maybe I'll spring for that pbase account now...

Keep them under 800 pixels across, and you can attach them to your posts (1 at a time)

dave

[Jozua]

Bamajohn

Just to elaborate: I use the Soundstream 10.5 Class A amp in my car and find it extremely musical. I use the BLT setup running from a Alphine source.

I also bought the Picasso amp and the active crossover with the intention of doing a real high end installation. (According to the agent I was the first person to order a Picasso amp in South Africa.) As a temporary measure I quickly installed the 10.5 in the back whilst waiting for my installer to be ready to do istall the Picasso to drive the mids and tweeters and the 10.5 for the sub. Well it sounded so good that I did not even bother to install the rest. The rest of the equipment has been lying unused in my garage for nearly three years. The 10.5 has a grip on the speakers which I find rivals my Krell setup I use at home.

I went through quite a search/various installations to get the right car speakers. So when I found the Kef units I bought all the speakers in dublicate in order to have spares if a unit should perish. Kef car speakers is no longer available in South Africa so it was quite a wise move. That is a curse of living in a country where dealers come and go. My personal suspicion was that the dealership folded because of staff that did poor installations and had now idea of how to get good sound. All they were interested in was getting maximum bass with cheap amps. Interestingly when the Kef dealer folded they gave me another set of speakers that they thought were blown with the eternal crossovers. When I tested them at home, they worked fine !

Knowing how good these Kefs can sound I am therefore quite interested in mouting them in the correct enclosures in a domestic setup. I suspect that one could just be pleasantly surprised.

Regards

[BamaJohn]

Pictures of the set are here:
KEF 690Q Speakers

Jozua, KEF KAR speakers are no longer available anywhere. The entire KAR division was sold to a company in Japan who no longer makes the speakers at all. KEF's own website ignores the fact that these were made at all--the only automotive page on their entire site doesn't mention the 160Q, 690Q, 130Q, 100Q, or any of their later model car subs--they had an 8" and 10".

KEF's Automotive page

Some KEF KAR history is also mentioned in this article:
KEF Theater Install in an Impala SS

I think KEF's idea and patents are one of the best solutions for the car environment--I don't understand why they didn't continue to sell. Just about anybody I've ever heard talk about these speakers has placed them at the very top of the list for sound quality.

[BamaJohn]

My posts are being moderated, so folks who asked for these pictures may not have seen my post. TTT please.

[bountyhunter]

Just to let all of you know I have a huge stock pile of the original KEF 160b's 130M's, 110 M's, 160B's, 690Q's, and the 6.5 uniQ's. These are the black versions not the coustic blue versions. Let me know if any of you are interested.
Adam

[Pallas]

I have no experience with the 690Q, but I'm very familiar with the acoustically-similar 160Q - they use the same KX3 crossover - which I have used since 1994 in my Citroen.

The KEF KAR series woofers (this statement applies to the 160B, 160Q, 690Q, 200B, and 250B) have fairly high Qts, to sound accurate in a car door. I think my 160Q's have a Qts of around 0.6. So forget about ported bookshelf speakers, though a sealed bookshelf of about 0.75ft^3 (EDIT) may work pretty well for your 690Q's.

Another factor mitigating against home installation of these speakers is that unlike most car speakers they were designed properly for use in car doors, i.e. with a rising on-axis response in the midrange that produces a flatter and smoother off-axis response.

What I think might be a very interesting usage of these drivers is on an open baffle, with a dipole or cardoid sub. The high-Qts is then a good thing, and I agree with you that these speakers have a very appealing sound, though keep in mind that one reason they sounded so good in the shop is because most even "high end" car speakers are complete garbage (EDIT because I didn't know synonyms for "excrement" that begin with "c" were censored)....