Music vs. Television

How to settle the fight for your living room

Today’s intervention is about soundbars, a post inspired by the excellent new Kanto REN powered stereo speakers that have taken up residence in my den.

When you go to Best Buy, they’ll be happy to sell you a soundbar/subwoofer pair and promise that, after you plug it into your TV at home, you’ll experience the audio thrills of Dolby Atmos surround sound without all those complicated wires.

This is a lie.

If you want truly immersive Dolby Atmos sound for your movie, you need an array of speakers. You definitely need at least a pair in front of you and a pair behind you and those speakers need upward-firing drivers in addition to the ones on the front of each unit. You probably need a center speaker under the screen, and you definitely need a subwoofer for those low-end explosions.

If you’re really doing it right, you need to ditch the upward-firing speakers and use wires to install four speakers in your ceiling that fire down towards the speakers in your living room. (Those upward-firing speakers are supposed to bounce off the ceiling and create the same effect. Some of them do a pretty good job, but there’s no replacement for the real experience.)

That’s a lot of expense and a lot of wiring, and most people will think that’s too much audio detritus strewn around the living room. The audio business has come up with an alternative. “Dolby Atmos” soundbar-and-subwoofer pairs that use DSP (digital signal processing) to create the illusion of immersive audio.

There are some soundbars that do a reasonably good job of creating that illusion, and there are plenty of people who are happy with that setup. Unfortunately, all that DSP makes that kind of soundbar an absolute nightmare for stereo music playback. I’ve never heard a fake Atmos soundbar that didn’t make music sound like garbage.

Again, most people aren’t going to have a stereo audio system and a soundbar in their living room, so what are you supposed to do if you want to listen to music in your living room and don’t want the expense or complications of two different audio systems?

The solution is stereo.

As powered speakers have improved over the past few years, customers have been clamoring for units with HDMI ARC inputs so they could also be used for TV sound in addition to streaming audio or playing back music from a connected turntable or CD player.

Several companies have responded with some excellent options, including the KEF LSX II ($1,300), Klipsch’s The Nines ($1,200/pair), and the PSB Alpha IQ ($1,500/pair). All of those sell for upwards of $1200/pair. The always-reliable Canadian audio company Kanto has just entered the market with the REN, a powered speaker that lists for $600 a pair.

I’ve been using Kanto gear for years. As I write this, I’m checking masters for an upcoming project with Kanto ORA desktop reference speakers (paired with a subwoofer) and I use the larger Kanto ORA 4 desktop reference speakers (without the sub) on my desk at Soapbox.

The ORA speakers ended a years-long search for desktop reference speakers that also worked for everyday listening. They’re great, but the REN speakers sound even better.

Looks

Pixels can’t quite convey how compelling the orange REN speakers are in person.

Kanto’s ’70s sci-fi futurism aesthetic may be even more pronounced with the REN than they are with the ORA. As the speakers get larger, those rounded corners and the gentle slope of the woofer and tweeter depressions seem even more pronounced. s’80s retro gear is all chrome, black, and brutally sharp corners. Kanto goes back further to that mid-century post-psychedelic design moment that never quite took hold like it should have.

I’ve been testing the matte orange speakers, which manage to evoke both a muscle car paint job and Braun’s orange appliances from the ’70s. Kanto ships them with cloth grilles that attach magnetically to the front of the unit, but it would be a shame to cover up the design. Don’t use the grilles.

Take your REN speakers from ASDFSAD to dull with the included cloth grilles.

REN speakers are also available in an equally compelling matte blue, plus matte grey (incorrect British spelling since Kanto is a Canadian company), matte black, and matte white.

These are bookshelf speakers. Each Kanto REN measures 7” wide, 8.5” deep, and 10.9” high (17.8 x 21.5 x 27.7 cm). The active speaker (which houses the amp and electronics) weighs approximately 9.9 lb. (4.5 kg), while the passive speaker weighs about 8.6 pounds (3.9 kg).

Music & inputs

These are music-first speakers, and the DAC that Kanto is using for the digital-to-analog conversion sounds great. The built-in amp is rated for 200 watts of peak power (100 W total RMS). If you don’t know or care about specs, just understand that there’s plenty of power to drive the speakers.

Let’s start with the music inputs.

Bluetooth: You can stream music from a phone or tablet with Bluetooth 5.3 via the AAC codec. That’s the current version of the streaming standard and AAC is the higher-quality audio file that Apple uses for iPhone. You don’t get support for all the fancy audio codecs available on higher-end Android devices. If you don’t know what any of that means, you really shouldn’t worry about it. Bluetooth is always a less-than-perfect format, no matter what claims anyone makes on its behalf.

3.5mm: There’s a single 3.5mm input if you want to plug in a vintage MP3 player or a portable CD player.

RCA: You can hook up a turntable that has its own phono preamp to the RCA inputs or use them for a music streaming device, tape deck or CD player.

Optical (TOSLINK): The excellent DAC built into the REN speakers might be better than the one in your CD player. It’s definitely better than the one in an old DVD player if that’s what you’re using to play CDs. If your CD playback device has an optical output, you can plug it in here and keep the RCAs open for a turntable or tape player. If you want a dedicated music streamer, you can get a WiiM Mini for less than $100. The WiiM’s DAC isn’t great, but it has all the streaming capabilities of the companies more expensive models and you’ll bypass that inferior DAC if you use the optical output.

USB-C: If you want to connect directly to a computer, you can get up to 24-bit/96kHz audio playback from a streamer like Tidal, Qobuz, or Apple Music.

There’s also a USB-A output on the back of the powered speaker. You can plug in a dedicated streamer and skip the outlet.

You’ve got almost every audio option you could want here. If you want to use these for a mini-system with turntable and CD player, they are outrageously good speakers at $600. If you want to skip all the extra hardware and just use them as Bluetooth music speakers, they sound as good as any bluetooth speakers I’ve ever heard.

What you don’t get is the WiFi support that would allow an iPhone user to use AirPlay 2 instead of Bluetooth. You’ll need a dedicated streamer like the WiiM Mini if you want to do that.

Sitting round watching television

There are dozens of powered speakers that offer most or all of these audio features, but there are very few that also include an HDMI ARC (with CEC) input for connecting a television.

Maybe that’s because most retailers have been chasing the surround sound market, but a few manufacturers are realizing that some of us don’t enjoy the fake Atmos. Stereo playback sounds great for sports, HGTV, Netflix shows, old movies on TCM, and I guess it would sound just fine for anyone who still watches the news.

It’s not going to simulate the theater experience when you’re watching something like Dune, but we’ve got movie theaters for that kind of experience.

It’s true that that the REN speakers are better at playing back movie explosions or deep bass hip hop if you connect them to a subwoofer like Kanto’s excellent $270 Sub8, but I think most listeners will be happy with just the REN audio. You’ve got the option for vocal boost or a night mode that cuts the bass.

There’s an outstanding remote, the speakers automatically take care of the crossover if you plug in a subwoofer, and Kanto makes excellent speaker stands if you need them.

If you buy them from Amazon, I get a small commission. If you don’t want to shop at Amazon, I’d recommend Crutchfield or Audio Advice, two retailers that offer outstanding customer support.

Clean & simple

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to cut out the background noise and focus on each moment as it comes. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism as the world rages around us. I’m testing out a lot of gear that I think can increase focus and filter out distractions, and I’ll be writing about it over the next couple of months.

One of the biggest distractions in my world is digitally manipulation. Many of the excellent niche news sites I’ve relied on over the years have long published awkward copy in an effort to comply with Google’s ever-changing SEO (search engine optimization) rules, but things have fallen off a cliff now that we’re flooded with articles doubled or tripled in length by AI-generated copy that has nothing to say.

The DSP that powers most of the immersive audio on Apple Music is exhausting, following a formula that can’t replicate the millions of conscious and unconscious decisions a human being would make if he or she were making a surround sound mix.

The same goes for soundbars. Why is the Kanto REN’s stereo playback so much more relaxing than the artificial Atmos I’d be getting from a soundbar? Is it because I learned to listen to music in stereo? Would I have been freaked out by stereo in 1957 if I’d spent my life listening to mono?

Do the $1,300 KEF LSX II powered speakers sound better than the $600 RENs? Based on brief demos of the KEFs at audio shows, I’d say that’s almost certainly true. The KEF also have an Ethernet jack and WiFi, which allows for AirPlay, Spotify Connect, and Tidal Connect support. Unless you’re obsessed with the design of the LSX II, I think most people would be happy to save $700 and get a pair of the RENs.

I’m never going to give up my elaborate home theater system that shares space with an equally elaborate home audio setup, and I’m fortunate to live in a house where I’m allowed to have my Rube Goldberg contraptions.

I’ll also say that watching television or streaming music in the room with the REN setup is less cluttered and far more relaxing. The speakers are beautiful, the stereo audio is clean and never distracts, and everything just works when you turn on the television. No drama, no complications.

8-track of the day

Miss Loretta Lynn knew that s’70s orange was the best orange.