Sorry I've taken so long getting round to this.
Haha, Slippers, I have been a world traveller for sure, not by choice or even my work but by circumstance which I won't go into here. I am very pleased to be living in a small town in Oregon though.
Spoiler alert, I have since my November update sold the KEF LS50 Meta's and kept the PMC's !
I did spend considerable time with both speakers in my small listening room and I actually liked the presentation of both, but after rotating them both after having them in my system for alternate weeks I thought the PMC's outshone the KEF's in a few key areas important to me. Some of this I think is room dependent, I'm in a much smaller space for all intents and purposes listening near-field so I guess it makes sense for the PMC's performed better in smaller surroundings. When I was living in Wisconsin I had a larger listening room and although I liked the DB1's they did seem a little overwhelmed by this space never fully satisfying me. Maybe if I'd one this evaluation in that old room my feelings would have been different and I would have kept the KEF's ?
In terms of instrumental timbre these are quite similar sounding speakers, they have a similar overall character being transparent and true to source. One of the things I didn't care for with the original LS50 was the rolled off treble but with the Meta's I think KEF certainly went some way to addressing this where I felt I could live with it long term. The Meta's still don't have the high frequency extension of the soft dome tweeter on the PMC's which is not fatiguing or bright at all, it has just enough bite and detail but it doesn't try to impress by sounding Hi Fi. Overall I'd give the PMC's a just a slight edge here, having a more extended frequency response but never becoming brittle or bright.
In the midrange the PMC's have a little less have less body than the Meta's but you know what, when I listened to the Meta's then the DB1's they made the KEFS sound a little thick and even slightly veiled here in terms of transparency! I will add the caveat that depending on what I was listening to there were instances where the extra fullness of the Meta's was preferable. In terms of their instrumental timbre in the part of the spectrum these are actually quite similar sounding. I'm not as sensitive as some are in this area but I found them both equally convincing given the right material and neither of them are fussy about the genre of music you listen to. The PMC's have a hair more pace but the KEF's counter with more satisfying weight, this one is too close to call and down to personal choice.
Bass is really where the KEF's go deeper, its a little slower than the transmission line bass of the PMC's but I'd often find myself wishing that the DB1's had the same kind of depth. Listening in isolation you could actually convince yourself there was sufficient bass coming from the DB1's but when I swapped over the Meta's and I kept asking myself do the DB1's underpin the music as well as this ? I've already mentioned how my two different rooms have effected the sound and in the larger room the bass quantity always felt absent from the DB1's, here in my smaller room it was certainly better though not as much bass as I'd like. Even though the KEF's don't have the deepest bass a win for the Meta's here.
Both these speakers image well, the KEF's are renowned for this but surprisingly the PMC's are a little more precise sounding without ruining the musicians integration as a whole. Its really in the area of sound staging though that the DB1's are I think considerably better than the Meta's, slightly in terms of image height but significantly when it comes to the illusion of sound stage depth. If you are listening to anything that is recorded in a reverberant hall or that has had that effect added artificially the PMC's really do recreate a deep three dimensional space. The internal dimensions of a large symphony hall is conveyed so so much better than the KEF's which are good at width but don't stretch back nearly as far. For me the PMC's are more involving when it comes to creating musical event happening in a real space or revealing what the engineer might have added in a studio. Reverb and the music decay on the DB1's really do place you right in the mixing room which given PMC's monitor heritage seems to make sense.
The room we listen in is such a big factor that I do honestly feel that had I been back in my larger space my experience and choice would have gone the other way. I think it was the final factor that made me move the KEF's on and decide to try my first subwoofer ! I know. sacrilege to some audiophiles but you never know until you try yeah ? I have a REL T5x on its way which I've heard integrates well and can also be tuned for output so thats the route I've now gone.
PS: Slippers, I have the Iso acoustics pucks and carpet footers under my steel shot filled stands.
Art - SL1210GR + Goldring E3 are a killer match.
every time I fire these up they sound better than the last time even though PMC say 16 hours of run in should be plenty. I'm not going to claim they're perfect because they're not, I'll talk about their shortcomings later, for now some photo's. Whoops, posted in wrong section, my bad. Can a moderator move this to values please?
