I've been wondering a while if it might be worth it to consider replacing my 47 year old stereo speakers. I've always thought that they sounded good, but they were what I could afford as a college student. I read a bunch of reviews, and was pretty impressed with what was said about the KEF R3 Metas. However, they go for $2200 a pair, and I could not imagine that I would find them worth it. No one sells them near home, and I would never buy speakers without listening to them first.
We were going to my SIL's for Thanksgiving as usual, and there was one good audio store there that happened to carry KEF. They were not going to be open the whole holiday weekend, but were yesterday. We got into town early enough for me to run over and see what they had. Lucky enough, they had the R3 Metas. I listened, and was genuinely impressed with how they sounded. I could hear elements in familiar music that I do not get at home. I asked what there was at a lower price, and they put on a different pair of KEF's at $1300. Surprisingly to me, I could hear the difference. The others were still good, but lacking something vs. the R3's. I needed to get back to my SIL's before the traffic got too bad, and still needed to think about the expense. No one, even online, seemed to have a better price, except for used/dinged ones on Ebay. That evening, I looked up some more reviews, especially head to head comparisons with other similarly priced models. It's been a big BTD year already, but still I decided that I would go for it again. The store was closed, but I found that Amazon had dropped the price that evening by $100 on the last pair of the color I wanted, so they're on order.
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