“If you’re making an active speaker, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to do the driver or acoustic design in the same way you would with a passive. You can, that’s fine — but then you forego the opportunity to do something that might potentially perform better, or give the customer more options.” Those words were, post-pleasantries, the first uttered by the Vice President of Technology at KEF, Jack Oclee-Brown, during my recent conversation with him, and they resolutely encapsulate the ethos behind, and effort that has gone into, the company’s latest statement product, the LS60 Wireless. Indeed, the all-in-one active floorstanding speaker system is unique to anything in KEF’s passive speaker catalogue — a ground-up design that, despite inheriting existing KEF technologies, is like nothing else currently on the market.
Really, you only need to look at the image of them that illustrate this interview to see that. Two super-slim towers, each the width of a CD and mid-waist in height, with a miniaturised Uni-Q driver on the baffle and two mid/bass drivers on the side panels. KEF has received much acclaim in recent years for its more aesthetically conventional active standmounter systems, the original LS50 Wireless and smaller LSX, both now in their second generation, but adapting the concept for a floorstander form has seen Oclee-Brown’s team tear up the rulebook. The aim? To deliver a new calibre of active performance from a small, living room-friendly footprint. It’s a bold-statement product to celebrate KEF’s 60th anniversary this year, and could well be a seed from which many of the company’s creations grow over the next 60 years...
“We’re all used to this notion that if you want more bass and more efficiency, you have to build a bigger speaker... so we thought we’d try to be more aggressive than that.”
BIG SOUND, BIJOU FOOTPRINT
“This is really the first time we’ve said from the beginning, ‘this is going to be active so let’s make a set of drivers and a platform that is going to hit a performance target, and at a size that people wouldn’t normally expect to speaker to
