JUNE 2019 MACWORLD 115and your individual
preferences. These controls
are divided into two groups:
Basic and Expert.
The Basic controls include
whether the speakers are on
stands or on a desk, the
distance to the wall, the
acoustic characteristic of the
room (damped, moderate, or
lively), the size of the room,
and whether you have a sub
connected. The Expert controls
include a treble trim, phase
correction, bass-extension setting, high-
pass mode, subwoofer crossover, sub
gain, and sub polarity.
HOW WE TESTED
I placed the KEF LSX speakers on top of
the main speakers in my master bedroom,
where I could try them out using Bluetooth
and an optical cable from the TV. The KEF
Control app guided me through the setup
process step by step. All went smoothly
until I got to connecting the speakers to
my Wi-Fi network; the app didn’t see the
speakers in its network list.
I hit “Can’t locate speaker,” and the app
informed me that the light on the Master
should be blinking amber and white; it was
blinking amber only. The app instructed
me to reset the speakers using a paper
clip in the tiny reset hole, after which the
light blinked amber and white. The app
then found the speakers in the network
list, and the rest of the process went
without a hitch.
It’s possible to set up the LSX speakers
without Wi-Fi, but that limits the system’s
functionality and is not generally
recommended.
As I was listening, I played with the
sound settings in the KEF Control app.
After specifying that the speakers were on
stands rather than on a desk, I set the size
and acoustic characteristic of the room as
well as distance to the wall. The distance-
to-wall slider has no indication of its actual
setting; it only indicates the smallest and
largest settings (<10cm and >50cm
respectively). I wish it had a numeric
indicator under the slider itself, like some
of the other sliders do.KEF LSX wireless speakers deliver prodigous amounts of
high-quality audio for their size.