KEF is a British speaker manufacturer with over 50 years experience of producing industry leading products. KEF have received a host of awards and stellar reviews over the years, and currently offer a wide range of hi-fi
speakers and AV speakers.
The flagship KEF Blade and smaller KEF
Blade 2 speakers are renowned for their excellence and superb reproduction, and their advanced pioneering technologies and
Uni-Q Driver Array designs have filtered down into lots of KEF’s consumer-end products.
In 1961, KEF was founded by ex-BBC Electrical Engineer Raymond Cooke OBE and headquartered near Maidstone in Kent. It was set on the banks of the River Medway and the premises of a metal working company, Kent Engineering & Foundry. By experimenting with new technologies and materials, Cooke aimed to produce superior acoustic quality with recordings reproduced to the exact nature of the original performance.
This led KEF to become the first company to exploit the stability of Bextrene as a cone material incorporated in a series of drivers for many leading audiophile speakers. Another major breakthrough a few years later, KEF became the first to design and test loudspeakers via computers leading the industry the digital analysis of speakers. This revolutionary work resulted in KEF matching speaker pairs to within half a dB for flawless audio reproduction.
KEF eventually went on to produce their signature technology, the Uni-Q point source driver array in the next decade using NASA-developed magnets that were ten times more powerful than conventional ones. KEF stayed ahead of the game in the nineties with the advent of 5.1 home cinema recording by creating the first dedicated centre speaker in the UK, the Model 100 benefiting from Uni-Q.
Through the years, they have been developing impressive expertise in the use of advanced acoustical, magnetic and mechanical modeling techniques such as Finite Element Analysis resulting in an accuracy that was not previously achievable. Kept under wraps since the 1980s, KEF revealed their ACE technology in 2005 demonstrating the advantages of activated carbon inside a compact speaker enclosure and its effect on internal volume and bass extension.
Now 5 decades in, KEF's scientific innovation and hands-on experimentation cements its ultimate audiophile reputation and allows them to continue to lead in developing products ahead of the game. We stock the complete KEF range, from the multimedia range (that includes active speakers, headphones and earphones) to the Q series range, LS50 range, R series range, KEF Reference range and KEF Blade, along with custom install speakers and 5.1 speaker packages.