Forward centre KEF Sound Stage

[MiamiBlue]

I'm noticing the sound on my KEF system seems to be dominant to the front centre speaker on the dash at lower volumes. At anything upto 50% volume or so the door speakers are hardly 'on' compared to the front dash speaker. Once you turn up the volume fairly high the door speakers seem to kick into life and over power the dash speaker, and the sound quality significantly improves.

Has anyone noticed this? And if you do, have a solution?

 

[Nova]

I've never noticed that. I don't think you can listen to the system at 50% unless you are parked and engine off... I generally only listen at 80% volume or higher when driving.

That said, I am not sure why the system would behave that way. Maybe there is some volume-dependent gain settings going on, like a non-linear dynamic range compression curve being applied. DRC curves are common in integrated systems, although they tend to be applied equally to all channels playing the same frequencies/purpose, which in this case is the front sound stage.

 

[gcmak]

I wish I could move the balance rearwards. Subjectively I also observe that different areas of the cabin seem to fill with audio in a different way as the volume is changed.

On paper, I don't have hearing loss but I do have tinnitus so my experience of audio is a bit different..a little afraid if people need to crank their audio system up to 80% (assuming that's measured by the volume bar in the infotainment), because I don't think I've needed to exceed 50% for it to be a bit loud. I did crank it higher but things didn't sound any better...just messier. I'm using wired CarPlay. Perhaps other inputs may have lower starting volumes.