KEF LS60

I acquired a pair of KEF LS60 active wireless speakers in January 2024. The speakers are awesome, but getting them working well with Linux was not completely trivial, and is not quite complete.

At the time, I had the following versions of crap:

• Linux 6.7
• Pipewire 1.0.1
• Pulseaudio 16.1
• KEF firmware 2.0

Requirements

I was using MPD 0.23.14 for my music, but I needed a solution at the audio device level, so that video, system sounds, and everything else would use the speakers. So I was looking at pulseaudio or pipewire. I wanted to create a virtual device into which I could dump digital data (probably PWM). The speakers have a line in, but I did not want to do the digital-to-analog conversion on my machine, but rather to use the DAC of the $7,000 speakers. They also have an HDMI input, which could happily accept stereo PCM at up to 24 bits at 192 kHz, but I wanted wireless.

I might end up using the HDMI if I can't eliminate the latency of my wireless solution.

An ideal solution would involve:

• no cables between computer and speakers
• lossless transfer to speakers (either as unpacked PCM or packed FLAC/AAC/etc.)
• DAC at speakers
• minimal latency

Wireless

The specs list the following "wireless streaming features":

• AirPlay 2
• Google Chromecast
• Roon Ready
• UPnP Compatible
• Bluetooth 4.2

As far as I'm aware, Bluetooth audio is always going to involve a lossy compression.