Krix LX-7 Linear LCR review

One of Krix’s great successes through the fifth decade of the 50 years it has recently celebrated has been its modular ‘MX’ front baffle speaker systems, with their passive left, centre, right and subwoofers integrated into a ‘wall of sound’ designed for dedicated home cinemas with an acoustically-transparent screen.

These are great (Sound+Image award-winning) solutions for a front soundstage, but they can’t work with the new giant televisions now challenging projection for big-screen dominance, even in dedicated home cinemas. What is needed? Enter the Krix LX-7.

Build & design

If you visit Krix’s website homepage, it begins with a scroll of glamorous images showing the company’s equipment for home entertainment, for dedicated home cinema and for full-on commercial cinema. But the individual product pages are much more matter-of-fact – clean and simple, a couple of well-placed pics, but focused firstly on the specifications, only secondly on the spiel, and even that hidden under a description tab, rather than marketed in your face, as is the norm.

This is all very refreshing; the pages feel designed to help engineers and installers quickly identify the right tool for their task. So for the LX-7 the downloadable specification sheet includes accurate technical drawings for wall-mounting the LX-7, either flush or using the supplied tilting bracket for 15 degrees of tilt, up or down. Only one sentence of PR makes it through, leading the product page with: “It’s not a soundbar... It’s a sound experience.”

But of course, it is a soundbar in literal terms, or at least a ‘Linear LCR - soundbar’, as Krix’s own dropdown menus compromise on defining it. But it’s not your average soundbar. Indeed there are multiple ways in which the LX-7 deviates from the norm.

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It's passive not active: The vast majority of mass-market soundbars are all-in-one products: there are amplifiers inside them to power the drivers; you just plug it in, connect the TV and (under ideal circumstances) sound will come out.

The LX-7 is a passive LCR: it is a loudspeaker but not an active speaker; there are no amplifiers inside. You must bring your own three channels of amplification, most likely from a multichannel AV amplifier/receiver.

Krix says the LX-7 is also intended to be used with a subwoofer (one of their own, preferably). You might operate it without surround speakers, but it’s meant to be part of a full system, and since there aren’t many three-channel amps around these days (as there were at the advent of surround), you’d be remiss not to get some speakers behind you to enjoy genuine surround. If you can’t run cables, there are AV receivers which can connect to wireless active surround speakers. But run cables if you can.

Passive operation makes perfect sense, given Krix’s 50 years experience designing primarily passive loudspeakers. A passive LCR fits Krix’s skillset. And it’s not a unique approach: other passive bars are available from Theory Audio Design, Monitor Audio, Definitive Technology (which has a long track record in this type of soundbar), and others, especially in the custom installation space.

But certainly this is an entirely different proposal to a plug-and play soundbar; it necessarily enlarges your kit list and complicates the connections. And that’s the point: this is not one of those soundbars. The LX-7 intends to deliver another level of performance entirely. The advantage of this approach, as Krix says, is that you can enjoy a high-performance result, unlimited by the
low-powered amps in conventional soundbars: “High power handling and sensitivity ensure movie soundtracks, games and music are delivered with incredible power and dynamic range,” promises the company.

Instead of thinking up from a normal soundbar, then, you might instead think down from those large Krix MX-series ‘wall of sound’ modular front baffles. The LX-7 feels (and looks) as if Krix has squeezed this ‘Modular X’ into a new ‘Linear X’, employing the same variability in width via a system of spacing, but in a box of these lesser dimensions. Though these dimensions are still…

It's not particularly compact: The vast majority of mass-market soundbars are designed to be compact, especially when supported by a subwoofer; we have reviewed some tiny things in our pages, although with varying results.

The LX-7 could not be described as compact. A text arriving from Sydney Hi-Fi Mona Vale’s Mick Stillone, before he brought over the LX-7, began: “You may want to start doing your squats and limbering up”.

There are several sizes of LX-7; the version we carried up our steps was more than six feet long, and 27kg out of its packaging. Having heaved it into its final position, and valiant Mick having departed, there was mild hilarity when later reading, under Krix’s description section, that “The sleek design requires minimal space above or below your screen.” Can such a beast be considered ‘sleek’?

Well perhaps, if you consider its native environment. It will be dwarfed by the TV screens it is designed to match – the three fixed sizes of the LX-7 are tailored to perfectly fit the widths of 75, 85 and 100-inch diagonal screens. all priced at the same AU$4995. Impressively, you can order absolutely any size in between those, and a little extra, up to 226cm length, to be made for you as a custom order (LX-7 ‘CL’) for only AU$500 extra. All variations vary only in length; they share the same relatively shallow 142mm depth, sharing the same driver complement simply spaced further apart down the bar.

So it can perfectly match the TV for width, to be neatly mounted below (we’ve seen one picture where it is above the TV, which looks weird), and in that context the LX-7 is by no means in-yer-face, particularly when wearing the long one-piece grille. Dark walls will assist its blending in still further; for lighter walls you can’t paint the supplied black grille, but Krix tells us they can, at extra cost, supply a grille in “about 20 different material options”.

It's a mini wall of sound: What else is different? Many soundbars these days have drivers facing all manner of directions in a valiant but invariably vain effort to produce a surround sound effect from their forward position, bouncing sound off walls and ceilings, or phasing things up with unsavoury algorithms.

Krix’s drivers all face directly forward, as do the three ports; we assumed and Krix confirmed that these indicate three separated bass-reflex chambers. So you can tilt the LX-7 to aim it, as described above, but there will be no bouncing off walls here, thank you. The LX-7 is designed to front a real surround system, not a pretend one. There are no algorithms, no processing; no power! (If the LX-7 could have an energy rating, like a normal soundbar, it would get infinite stars.)

Grille off, it’s highly impressive, a mini-wall of sound with drivers stretching from end to end. Each of the LCR channels gets the same pair of drivers: the outer channels have their horn-loaded high-frequency units on the outside, creating as wide an image as possible, with their woofers to the inside. The driver pairs and their general size make each section rather like a pair of Krix’s Hyperphonix 45 on-wall speakers turned outward and sideways. Those Hyperphonixes have prominent non-parallel sides: narrow front to wider back; the LX-7 looks more the rectangular box, a bit wider, but it does actually chamfer back at the rear; Krix confirms that internal volumes are similar, though rise as the bar lengthens.

For the centre channel, Krix presumably had a coin-flip decision as to whether to put the high-frequency unit to the right or left of the woofer (unless coaxial drivers or a three-driver variation were to be considered). They went with tweeter on the right, but so far as we can see, there’s nothing to stop you having it the other way up, or even anything to indicate either orientation is ‘correct’; we just picked the way that matched Krix’s product images.

When setting up and sitting only a metre away we did note that this separation of the two centre drivers left the centre sound leaning either slightly left or right of the centre point depending on which driver dominated at any time. But sitting back even two metres away, the driver outputs merged and locked properly to the centre position and the screen above.

It’s worth noting that Krix delivers here the absolute ideal set of LCR speakers in all three being identical. Many home surround systems have a surprisingly small centre speaker used with large left/rights, usually for two reasons: few people want to spend as much on a centre as on their main stereo speakers, and secondly a large centre often gets in the way if it’s in front of the screen.

Krix has long offered centre speakers which properly match its stereo pairs. A small centre both damages dialogue intelligibility and squeezes any sounds that pan across the soundstage. All three should be the same, exactly as Krix delivers here.

(We did ask whether you might, for an extreme LX-7 system, put one LX-7 vertically either side of the TV and a third one underneath for LCR, each tri-amped. Would it be brilliant, or a mess? Probably a mess, Krix replied; use their KX-1062 instead.)

The build is excellent, well finished all round. Grilles off, we notice that the mounted squares holding the woofers are just a few millimetres larger than the squares of the horned tweeters, so they don’t quite match in size and the screws don’t line up. But grilles on, you’ll never see it. Even grilles off, with a screen blazing away above, you’ll never see it. Hardly worth mentioning. Besides, you wouldn’t want to mess with the dimensions of the classic Krix 90×90 short-throw waveguides used around the 26mm ferrofluid-cooled doped-fabric dome tweeters, with their large roll surrounds.

The woofers are 165mm (6½-inch) paper cones with large 50mm voice coils wound on high powered kapton formers. Their ventilated spiders and aluminium flux stabilisation ring promote low distortion, says Krix.

Listening sessions

Connecting any surround system is generally a fiddly affair, but we must say that the connections at the Krix end of things are very friendly indeed. Pop off the blanking plate to the right of the centre drivers (see above) and six binding posts are revealed right at the front of the unit, with cable management access behind.

So you will never need to move the LX-7 to pop cables through and connect them to the posts; you have easy access at all times. Those binding posts are solid push types: push them in (push hard; the springs are powerful) to thread the cable through – no plugs or spades allowed, though: only bare cable up to around 10 AWG (2.5mm) thickness.

Which sockets are for the left, and which for the right? They’re unlabelled, and it will depend which way up you have the LX-7! We took a guess, and were wrong, so we switched the cables. Not very hard. But now we can’t remember which were which, so you’ll have to find out for yourselves…

We ran the bar as part of our 5.1.2 system, adding two rear speakers, two height speakers and a Krix Seismix 3 subwoofer that are part of our normal reference system. The LX-7 replaced our usual front speakers, the L/R of which have twin horns and 12-inch woofers, while our centre uses twin 8-inchers (see, even we mismatch our centres, which is why we listen to Atmos music in 4.1.2).

We let the LX-7 play away to itself for a day and a night (Mick had warned us this unit was fresh from the box), then over the next week we gave it all manner of fare, from Atmos to 5.1 to stereo and even mono. The LX-7 just sucked down three channels of whatever the resident Yamaha receiver had processed and supplied for our immersive entertainment.

Starting small. Playing effectively at relatively low levels is important in any TV sound system that will be used for daily viewing; the Krix LCR projected casual programming with great intelligibility, though you might want to fashion a setting on your AV receiver to take the subwoofer out of circuit for such casual use, lest some pumped-up ad or the buzzer at the end of HYBPA? causes you to jump out of your skin. The LX-7 is by no means light-sounding without its subwoofer; Krix rates it down to 60Hz, though without stating an envelope.

We could play music this way as well, although any 2.0 stereo source playing from the Yamaha receiver would arrive at the LX-7 with two channels only and no subwoofer support. We’ll return to this, however, as other options for music are very much available.

The low-level performance was good, then, but the LX-7 is built to go big. And impressively big, as it turned out. The bangs don’t get much bigger than Oppenheimer delivered in DTS-HD MA; even through dialogue scenes the insistent surround music soundtrack never lets up – except, in a piece of genius by director Nolan, for the Trinity test itself, which unfolds in near silence for minutes (it’s a devastating moment to see in a full cinema), until the sound wave from the blast then hits, repeatedly, shown in different locations. That will test your whole system, and the LX-7 slammed the wave at us almost viscerally.

Another amazing sonic moment in Oppenheimer is his full team stomping on the bleachers post-blast to congratulate Oppie, an effect so impressively recorded and delivered that it is used earlier in the soundtrack as presagement. The sound direction of this movie is as complex as the plotline (though pipped at the Oscars for Best Sound by Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest), and the LX-7 in cahoots with its sibling subwoofer had no problems delivering either its detail or the sheer slam this movie often requires.

We loaded up the 4K Blu-ray of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, in DTS-X. There’s a lot of old-style diffuse surround used here, but the accuracy of steering was still impressive as Jack Black ran from his producers (like he ran from Tenacious D) into a busy New York street scene, his fleeing car transitioning seamlessly from front centre to rear left, passing almost believably below the viewing position, though the sound elements could not do so, floor speakers remaining the last untapped bastion to extend immersion’s current mere hemisphere of sound.

The width of sound was impressive from our on-axis position: the sound of one ship door clicking closed was panned so far left it was misplaced beyond the edge of our mere 75-inch screen; every centimetre of this LCR bar is used to create soundstage width. Meanwhile our rears and height speakers spread the stage above and over the listening position as the ship crashed its way onto rocks off Skull Island. Immersive stuff indeed.

High scores for accompanying visual entertainment, then. Music required some consideration, followed by adjustment after that initial music playback had come through in stereo 2.0. It had sounded OK, like a pair of respectable small standmounts, but rather less inspiring and far less dynamic than we’d heard from its movie performance. So we were wondering if the LX-7 was really more movie machine than music maker.

But in pure 2.0 the LX-7 is hog-tied: the bar is reduced to two-thirds strength, the centre drivers lie fallow, and the system is also shorn of subwoofer support. So we set up a specific ‘Scene’ on the Yamaha receiver which would instead deliver stereo music in 3.1. When we tried that there was far more sound, if not opening things up to the level of our much larger and pricier usual main speakers.

Most receivers itch to throw any stereo material around your whole system as ‘all-channel stereo’. You can decide how far you wish to employ this slightly impure way of pumping up your music; 3.1 worked for us.

But why listen in stereo when you can listen to multichannel music! Whether new Atmos mixes from Blu-ray, or Atmos streams from Tidal or Apple (the streams must be played via an AppleTV 4K to get the surround), or from antique 5.1 DVDs, this surround system brought access to the great joys, though sometimes also lesser joys, of surround music.

Atmos remasters are particularly variable: Tidal offers playlists of Atmos-remastered 1950s and 1960s songs that are barely worth trying. From the 70s, though, we were delightfully immersed in The Bee Gees' Staying Alive and McCartney’s dramatic Live & Let Die, both benefitting from properly immersive mixes and the use of all three Krix channels for a much bigger sound than 2.0 could offer. Some Chic classics certainly got the party going, and the combo of four speakers and sub plus LX-7 had Le Freak genuinely bouncing off the ceiling: powerful, immersive, and solidly funky in the crisp-edged sound from the bar.

For still crisper delights, we played Atmos and 5.1 Blu-rays: the Krix sub and bar pulsing the heartbeat opening of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ to its true depth, and impeccably placing the brilliant-mixed Atmos elements of Peter Gabriel’s ‘i/o’. Music may not be the LX-7’s top strength – we thought there was occasionally a slight honk to vocals and midrange elements compared with genuine two-channel hi-fi speakers, yet when we loaded the 4K Blu-ray of A Star Is Born and blasted out Shallow (one of Krix’s own preferred wall-of-sound demos when first released), the LX-7 nailed both male and female vocal tones. Only on the final climaxes, with all channels belting, did any level compression become apparent – and that could well have been the AV receiver’s reserves hitting capacity, rather than a limitation of the Krix. Under any but these extreme circumstances we simply revelled in the power and immersion of the LX-7’s musical presentation within a larger system.

Verdict

We tested the LX-7 with a traditionally full-size (large) AV receiver, but it occurs to us what a good match the Anthem MRX SLM receiver might make. Small enough to hide away, especially behind the larger TVs this bar is designed for, the MRX SLM would drive the LX-7 plus surrounds and sub without bringing a giant box into your home; the Krix speaker has not only high power handling but usefully high 92dB sensitivity, so the lesser watts of the Anthem may not be a restraint on the LX-7’s performance. We are not at all surprised to see some retailers presenting this Anthem/Krix combination as a bundle.

Because although it was a beast to carry up the stairs, Krix’s LX-7 is rather neater, even ‘sleeker’, than the alternate solution of separate left, right and centre speakers, although Krix’s Hyperphonix 45s certainly offer a direct alternative in that regard (and three of those would come in significantly cheaper).

The LX-7, however, has the integrity, with everything in one clean horizontal line under that big TV. Suitably powered from a decent receiver and supported by a subwoofer, this Krix delivered truly cinematic LCR performance, like a smaller yet highly dynamic mini cinema wall from this Australian company who knows exactly how the real thing should sound. It’s not at all hard to set up yourself, but it’s certainly worthy of professional use, and we can imagine that the LX-7 will be forming the front sound stage for many a professional custom installation that involves a large-screen TV rather than a projection solution.

Big, but not so big in context; passive, yet sounding impressively powerful; and fully Australian, designed and manufactured here: the Krix LX-7 is so successful that it should persuade a good many people to consider this different path to a completely different level of soundbar (or ‘Linear LCR’) sound.

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