The Kali IN-8 came close to being a keeper after shopping for a year for new speakers. Unfortunately the hiss is audible midfield in an untreated room with background noise. Baseline Criteria: (In some cases relative to my HiVi DIY 3.1)
-More bass extension
-Better vertical dispersion
-Better horizontal dispersion
-Zero port chuffing playing Jamie XX Reconsider at 2:20
-No audible self noise/hiss
This speaker excelled all all but the last, and did so poorly with the last requirement it was returned.
Listening in a living room from ~6 feet away, the hiss is audible even with a refrigerator running in an adjacent room that has an opening ten feet wide into this one.
During very soft parts of songs it's audible, and it is bothersome when things are paused.
Troubleshooting:
-Turning down the speaker almost all the way has a minor impact but you lose dynamic range and volume.
-Testing at a friend's studio with power conditioning and clean balanced signals.
-Removing the ground plug from a splitter as shown in the video.
-Plugging into different circuits, the same circuit, and the same power strip.
-Maximizing the gain of the input devices and using multiple devices.
-Only having power plugged in.
None of these things affected the hiss besides turning them down a ton, and even then, I'd put the hiss on par with a JBL LSR308, which had louder hiss than a Mackie HR824, which hisses more than a Genelec 8040 (which approaches silent, as you have to be closer than 6" to hear it,) which hisses louder than an Elac Navis where I didn't notice any hiss at all, even putting each speaker inches from my ears to simulate the extreme separation of headphones.
Sound wise I only listened for a couple of days, but they are warm compared to a friend's Yamaha HS8, though that could likely be corrected by the switches on the back which I didn't tweak at this studio besides for the stand setting.
Listening to them alone, they initially passed all my test songs: realistic vocals, small mouth movement details came though, phantom center is fairly easy to get, bass extension is good, and trumpets and triangles aren't sharp/peaky enough to scratch my ear off.
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