If you’re short on time and just want the highlights of this article, here it is:
The Kanto Living YUP4 is a great speaker for anyone looking for a cost-effective way to enjoy music in their home. It offers a wide range of features and connectivity options, allowing you to connect it to your amplifier, TV, computer, or home network and stream audio from various music services. The sound quality is good but can be a bit muddy in the low end and harsh in the highs.
Overall, the Kanto Living YUP4 provides decent sound quality for the price and plenty of features and connectivity options. It is a great choice for anyone looking for a budget-friendly speaker with decent sound quality, but those looking for the best possible sound quality should look at more expensive options.
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Now let’s get to its bolts and nuts.
Kanto Living YUP4 Review: Sound quality
Let me tell you something right off the bat.
The sound quality performance you'll end up getting from a speaker will always depend on your room acoustics - particularly room dimensions and speaker positions.
The impact of the combination of these two is actually so strong that in most cases, it doesn't even make sense to utter a single word on sound quality without speaking of them.
This is also why it's not unusual to see completely different reviews of the same speaker.
In one case the speaker might be placed in a sweet spot inside the room and hence the user might be satisfied. In other cases the same speaker might be ill placed and hence user might even have returned it.
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The point most people miss here is that it mostly isn't even about the engineering behind the speaker itself. It's about where you place the speaker inside which room.
So, in order to solve this problem, I've partnered with Acoustics and Audio Engineering PhD Andrea Cicero from AC Acustica and created Soundton - a simple, 2D, browser accessible online speaker placement calculator.
With Soundton, now there's a way to figure the sound quality of most speakers before you buy them.
Read more about its working principles at soundton.com.
The end colormap provides you the locations with the best (green) and worst (red) acoustics.