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Bowie's androgynous-cool voice appeared in space like a scissor cut. To talk of 'natural' with such productions obviously overreaches but absence of coloration seemed very à propos. I didn't sense any midband effects. A quick cross check with Tori Amos' minimally arranged Nirvana classic "Smells like teen spirit" from Cruzify confirmed it. I've checked this number with many a hifi system and for numerous speaker reviews to feel confident that the Kelinac was neither too warm, too aloof or 'wrong' in any other fashion, just... well, natural. There.
On a dense not overcooked mix like Bowie's "The next day" for another taste of David, speakers can struggle with accessing a proper view into the cut where one clearly sees each musician's individual contributions to the organic whole. This the 711 sorted out well. Take the background theme of organ whose melodic arc as discrete event the Kelinac made well intelligible. Yet this didn't upset the overall balance which I crossed off as another plus. I kept seeing the forest, not just the leaves.
High dynamic chops came under the loupe with Karajan's reading of Beethoven's 1st Symphonie in C major op. 21. When the maestro leads the Berlin Philharmonic in their own house into "Menuetto allegro molto e vivace", a speaker demonstrates whether it can handle an orchestra's full bandwidth. And the Kelinac proved equal to the task. I was impressed by how large and room-filling this Deutsche Grammophon production manifested in my listening room. This acoustic flooding of my work space left a three-dimensional impression with easeful perception on my part of the various orchestral sections and their locations.
Should one wish to criticize the French on dynamics, it'd relate to the seamless tonal balance I praised earlier. This virtue is so dominant as to lack the last degree of explosive impulsiveness of the mentioned T+A TCD 310S. When the Berliners light up the concert hall with their big kettle drums, I could have wished for a bit more pressure and amplitude – more violence.
The upper harmonic spectrum of the Versailles box meanwhile illuminated the far reaches without getting artificial or glassy. Naturally massed strings or brasses building up to a crescendo can approach the onset of involuntary wincing. That's merely reality and as such beyond any protest. The KEF XQ40's dual-concentric driver could veer into the metallic here which particularly at higher playback levels could be too much at least for less stout ears.
Here Kelinac's magnesium tweeter was the more social though not subtractive. This benign handling of the upper treble meant that even mainstream radio-ready Pop remained digestible. There was no doubt that Tomte's front man Thees Uhlman had his new album #2 mastered for Pop broadcast, kitchen and car radios. But it remained fun because the 711's snarling dry groove still did its thing.
