About KEF

A Global Brand

KEF is a British company specialising in the design and production of a range of high-end audio products, including HiFi speakers, subwoofers, architecture speakers, wireless speakers, and headphones. It was founded in Maidstone, Kent in 1961 by a BBC engineer Raymond Cooke OBE (1925–1995). KEF is named after its original site, Kent Engineering and Foundry. Product development, acoustical technology research and the manufacture of signature products still occurs at the original Maidstone site in England. KEF’s ethos is based on the continuing quest to find new and better ways of reproducing sound. Since the company’s establishment, KEF has always driven innovation in sound. KEF was the first loudspeaker manufacturer in the world to implement the use of computers in loudspeaker design and measurement. KEF introduced the world’s first coincident source speaker driver called Uni-Q in 1988 which has evolved to 12th generation since then, and it is still featured in almost all its speakers today. KEF is the first company to use metamaterial to absorb the unwanted sound from the rear of speaker driver in HiFi industry, the technology is called Metamaterial Absorption Technology (MAT). KEF has received over 300 awards and holds more than 150 patents. KEF also published more than 50 academic papers and has received two Queen’s Awards for Export Achievement. In the early 1970s KEF was the first company to adopt computers for the testing and design of loudspeakers leading to the 'Total System Design' methodology and more sophisticated production techniques such as driver 'pair matching'. The radical Model 105 system, released in 1977, embodied this new philosophy and was one of the most highly regarded loudspeakers of its time. KEF, Bowers & Wilkins and Celestion were the "big three" British loudspeaker makers of the seventies and eighties and pioneered the use of advanced materials and techniques in audio. Developed by KEF in 1988, the Uni-Q driver array combines the midrange and woofer to avoid driver to driver interference. It acts as a single point source, providing pristine sound across a wider area. In conventional loudspeakers, mid and high frequencies radiating from different locations interfere with each other. MAT is a joint development with the Acoustic Metamaterials Group. Metamaterials are specially developed structures that use existing materials in such a way that they exhibit new, desirable properties that are simply not found in naturally occurring substances. Uni-Core technology, a patent-pending technology, combines two force-cancelling drivers into a single motor system. The overlapping voice coils are in different diameters and concentrically arranged. This configuration allows for more driver excursion than in other force cancelling design, delivering more output and depth from less cabinet size. In a conventional loudspeaker design, drivers producing different frequencies radiate from separate points causing interference as the drivers interact. Single Apparent Source Technology eliminates this interference by ensuring the entire frequency range radiates from one point in space, resulting precise imaging and highly accurate sound across a wider area.