I’ve gone through a myriad of center channel speakers throughout my home theater journey. It’s been a fun, long, but expensive search, and I’m finally happy to have found the best center channel speaker IMO with the KEF R6 meta. Towards the latter half of my search, I was using a full SVS Ultra speaker set-up. I then upgraded to a full Arendal 1723S 7.2.4 system. I was a lot more satisfied with the Arendals over the SVS system as I appreciated the neutrality and distortion-free capabilities of the system. However, I found the 2-way center speaker to be a bit lacking compared to the rest of the system. The relative lack of dispersion, dynamics, clarity, and nuance left me wanting more. This led me to purchasing this black gloss KEF R6 Meta as a replacement for my Arendal 1723S center channel speaker. Right away upon installation, I noticed an immediate upgrade in terms of clarity, dynamics, detailed nuances, and dispersion of sound. It felt like a veil had been pulled off of my former speaker. In addition, this is even before I re-ran DIRAC live calibration. Don’t get me wrong, the Arendal 1723S center speaker is a beast of a speaker. In my opinion, the KEF R6 Meta trumps it in every major way possible. I am now considering replacing all of my Arendal 1723S speakers with KEF R Series Meta speakers. If you’ve been on the fence about giving this speaker a try in your set-up due to lack of reviews out there, I would tell you to run (don’t walk), and purchase this ASAP. You will absolutely love it. Also, the build quality and aesthetics of this speaker are amazing.

I previously owned the kef q650 and the kef r2c. I bought this center to get the weightiness and impact of the q650 and the clarity of the r2c. To a degree, I did get all of these things. The r6 has the ability to go loud and blends with my sub without struggle at my 80hz crossover point. It has impact for sure, but I imagine the weightiness I heard with the q650 was more of a less flat bass response. I don’t feel this speaker is weighty sounding because of it’s flat/clear bass, which is a good thing. Additionally, this speaker has clear dialogue and crystal clear discreet sounds, just like my r2c did, but it is ever so slightly forward for now. With break-in and continued calibration tweaks that will probably go away. On the positive side, the adjustments/improvements made to the midrange and tweeter allow this speaker to play clearer 500hz and up at louder volumes. Where I might have noticed some break-up with the r2c, this one pushes through. So, as I said, I did get everything mostly from the two other speakers but not exactly how I expected. This speaker is really solid all-around, and is better than the r2c or q650 individually. I have noticed movies are more enjoyable because of it. If you are coming from the r2c, it is worth the upgrade if you could sell your old speaker to subsidize the cost. If you are coming from another, lesser speaker of another brand, prepare to be blown away.