KEF LS LUXE

Drawn from the Sound Itself

Most loudspeakers are boxes that have been persuaded to sound good. The KEF LS LUXE began the other way round. The acoustic engineers fixed the geometry first, and Ross Lovegrove, whose furniture, lighting and industrial design have long favoured forms that look grown rather than built, shaped the cabinet around what sound needs. The outcome reads as an object before a loudspeaker: two soft-edged sculptures that hold a room’s attention before a note is played, and justify the attention once one is.

Six years of research separate the KEF LS LUXE from the LS50 Wireless II, and KEF describes the newcomer as a step up, not a successor. The footprint on the shelf is much the same. What sits inside belongs to a different order of ambition.

One Voice from a Single Point

Each cabinet is fronted by KEF’s Uni-Q array in the twelfth generation of the design, the tweeter set in the throat of the larger cone so that treble and midrange leave from the same place at the same instant. The ear hears a single voice, not two drivers agreeing with each other, and the practical consequence is generosity: a sweet spot wide enough for two people on a sofa and a third in the doorway, and a tonal balance that holds whether the pair stands on a sideboard or on the matching floor stands.

Behind the dome sits Metamaterial Absorption Technology, a labyrinth of tuned channels that takes in almost all of the sound the tweeter would otherwise send backwards into the enclosure. Left alone, that energy creeps out through the cone as a fine haze over cymbals and voices. Here the haze is removed, and the treble acquires the calm of a well-lit room. The whole array hangs on a flexible decoupling chassis, an idea first used in the LS60 Wireless floorstander, so the motor’s vibration is damped before reaching the panels.

Bass That Answers to the Music

The deeper novelty is in the low frequencies. A conventional amplifier hands the driver a voltage and leaves the cone to interpret the instruction as well as a motor and a suspension can manage. The KEF LS LUXE reverses that relationship. Current-drive amplification regulates the current in the voice coil directly, and a patented velocity sensor, printed as a coil onto a flexible circuit board inside the motor, reads the cone’s actual movement and reports back continuously, so the amplifier corrects any difference between what was asked for and what the cone did.

KEF calls the loop Velocity Control Technology. The sensor made a first appearance in the XIO soundbar; the KEF LS LUXE is the first ported KEF loudspeaker to carry the idea, and the reward is the kind of bass a compact cabinet is not supposed to produce: quick, dry, tuneful, and unchanged in character from a late-night murmur to a full room. Each speaker is driven by 280 watts of Class D for the low and mid frequencies and 100 watts of Class AB for the treble, so the reserve is real, not nominal.

The Shape of Silence

The cabinet is moulded from a dense composite chosen for stiffness, which lets the shell do without the heavy internal bracing that usually eats into a small enclosure and gives that space back to the bass. Every edge is radiused. There is no trim ring, no badge and no grille frame to catch the wavefront on the way past, and the whole form leans towards the acoustic ideal of a sphere as far as a shelf allows. At the back, a finned aluminium heat sink carries away the warmth of the electronics, and the port is folded into the fins, shaped for smooth airflow so that loud passages stay composed.

Everything on One Shelf

The pair is a complete system. The KEF LS LUXE wireless speakers stream directly from Spotify, Tidal and Qobuz, accept AirPlay and Google Cast from anything else on the network, and will play a music library kept on a home server. A television joins by HDMI eARC on a single cable, with optical, coaxial and analogue inputs waiting for a CD player, a phono stage or a games console. Each cabinet carries an output for a KEF subwoofer, and the two speakers talk to each other either by cable or wirelessly, a choice that settles placement without touching performance.

Fitted to the Room

Setting up takes the KEF Connect app and a few honest answers: how far from the wall, on a stand or a desk, how large the room. From those, the system shapes the low end to the space in front of the pair, and an expert mode opens the same adjustments to anyone who prefers to work in figures. Digital phase correction tidies the timing between the two drivers, which the ear notices as snap on a snare and clarity on a plucked string rather than as anything that could be measured from an armchair.

Three Surfaces, One Sculpture

Eclipse Black is a matte surface that KEF likens to stone and branch, the cabinet as a found object. Mineral White turns the same form into light, a pale shell that reads as clean and modern in a bright room. Dusk Titanium carries a rippled surface pattern drawn from cymatics, the figures that sound traces when a plate of fine sand is set vibrating, so the finish is a picture of the very thing the speaker does. Acoustically the three are identical.

The S-LUXE floor stands were designed alongside the cabinets, with cable management inside the column and a fixing that locks the speaker to the top plate. The K-Stream cable extends the wired link between the KEF LS LUXE speakers across a wider room, and the KW1 kit lets a KEF subwoofer join with no cable at all.

In the Room on Wigmore Street

A compact active system is judged in the room where the pair will live, and Audio Lounge would sooner host a listening session on Wigmore Street than describe one. Bring the recordings you know best, ask to hear a KEF subwoofer added and then taken away, and talk through stands, placement and installation with people who install these systems. Enquire to arrange a private demonstration, and for delivery and installation across London and beyond.

About KEF

KEF has designed and engineered loudspeakers in Maidstone, Kent, since Raymond Cooke founded the company in 1961 with a conviction that music should arrive without drama, exaggeration or artifice. That conviction has produced a lineage of ideas more than a lineage of products: the Uni-Q point-source array, Metamaterial Absorption Technology, the Flexible Port and the current-drive research now inside the KEF LS LUXE all began as questions about how the ear hears, not how a brochure reads. One research programme serves the flagship floorstanders and the smallest wireless pair alike, so the family resemblance is audible before the badge is visible. Browse the Audio Lounge KEF collection for the wider range of loudspeakers, wireless systems and stands.