Legend Kumbar Wirri (Big Red) reference monitors

Kumbar Wirris are the new top-of-the-range loudspeakers from Legend Acoustics and represents the culmination of more than 30 years experience in designing & building loudspeakers by Dr Rod Crawford. They are elegant, world-class instruments designed and built in Australia to give you maximum enjoyment when you listen to your music or watch home movies.

The Kumbars are a modular design, combining and upgrading the technology of the award-winning Kurre and Kurlo loudspeakers and covering the full range of human hearing, from very deep bass to sparkling highs. They have the fast, open natural sound that makes all Legend loudspeakers so famous.

The upper part is the new Kurre 5 loudspeaker. Australian Hifi July 2005 said the Kurre 4s “set a new benchmark for small monitor loudspeakers …. they sound magic!”. The Kurre 4s were highly commended in the 2005 Sound & Image Awards. The Kurre 5s build on their extraordinary mid-band & treble clarity which enables you to hear your music & home theatre as it was recorded – and not through a layer of hard distortion or with 3 tea-spoons of sweetener added to everything! Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” will sound raucous; while Alfred Brendel’s Beethoven “Moonlight Sonata” will sound ephemeral.

The lower part of the Kumbar is the new Kurlo Bipolar subwoofer. It builds on the Kurlo 3 technology that was awarded Subwoofer of the Year in 2004 by Audio & Video Lifestyle magazine, saying “this is one of the cleanest, tightest and most musical subs I have heard. It goes very deep for its size”. But instead of a single 12” front firing driver, the Kurlo Bipolar has a pair of side-firing 10” drivers that use the same manufacturer’s technology and Legend’s modifications. With over 40% more radiating area, this enables it to effortlessly go deeper and louder, especially with its larger 500W built-in amplifier. Because the pair of drivers move in opposite directions, their vibrations cancel enabling the Kurlo Bipolar module to be used as an inert base for the Kurre 5 module on top.

The two modules may be used in a number of easily upgradable options:

1. passive external crossovers (see right photo above)
2. an active DEQX digital processor with Hypex amplifier modules
3. an active DEQX digital processor with amplifiers of your choice

The external passive crossovers use some of the highest quality components available worldwide – polypropylene capacitors and high-power metal-oxide resistors from Germany plus foil inductors from the USA. Having the crossovers external to the speaker cabinet eliminates microphonic feedback on components as well as making upgrading much easier.

Upgrading the Kumbar uses the DEQX PDC digital crossover and equaliser that is state-of-the-art technology developed by Kim Ryrie in Sydney and hailed by Stereophile magazine as the most significant loudspeaker development in recent years. It crossovers the signals to the different drivers in the digital domain where it can be done much more precisely. In addition, it reduces the distortions that are inevitable even to a small extent in the best electronic components that we use in the passive crossovers, because they operate with high level signals. And by allowing much steeper crossover slopes, the drivers also operate more readily in their appropriate frequency ranges, drastically reducing driver distortion. The PDC can also correct for room resonances at low frequencies, giving unparalleled accuracy across the whole frequency band. The PDC can vary the signal volume, eliminating the need for a pre-amplifier. Each loudspeaker driver is then driven by a separate power amplifier (bi/tri-amping) resulting in better control of the driver movement.