KEF’s stunning LS60 Wireless system could be the only hi-fi set-up you ever need
For its 60th anniversary celebrations, KEF could have kept things simple, and done the hi-fi equivalent of getting a few friends over for drinks, nibbles and maybe a couple of glasses of fizz. It could have built a new passive speaker to mark the occasion and nobody would have objected.
What KEF has actually done is go into full-on party mode, hiring a venue, getting the private caterers in and paying for a live band. Or, in hi-fi terms, it has decided to launch one of its most challenging products to date: the LS60 Wireless is a floorstanding sibling to its fantastic LS50 Wireless II all-in-one hi-fi system, and one of the most impressive-looking pairs of speakers we have seen this year.
The cabinets are extraordinarily slim, just 13cm across (excluding plinths). A slim cabinet calls for a slimmer-than-usual Uni-Q driver and KEF’s engineers have delivered a brand-new version of its trademark drive unit, specifically to cope with that shrinkage in width.
It is in fact the smallest Uni-Q driver the company has ever designed and combines a 10cm aluminium cone for the midrange with a 19mm vented aluminium dome tweeter. For this latest iteration of Uni-Q, KEF has added a tweeter gap damper and a new Z-Flex surround to aid dispersion and reduce distortion. The tweeter also uses KEF’s Metamaterial Absorption Technology (MAT), which we saw debut on the KEF LS50 Meta. MAT helps absorb soundwaves that radiate from the back of the tweeter dome so they don’t interfere with the unit’s forward output. It takes the form of a round piece of plastic with a maze-like structure placed behind the tweeter. Each ‘path’ in the structure is a certain size and length and ‘tuned’ to absorb a specific range of frequencies. KEF claims the paths help create an ‘acoustic black hole’, absorbing 99 per cent of the unwanted sound.
For the bass in this three-way speaker system, the company has called on the clever Uni-Core driver arrays that made their debut on the company’s tiny KC62 subwoofer back in January 2021. They are designed to deliver maximum bass from small enclosures, combining force cancellation (the drivers are mounted back to back), a shared magnet and two completely different, concentrically arranged voice coils (one for each driver).
Single Apparent Source
Two pairs of 14cm Uni-Core drivers in each tower are positioned equidistantly around the Uni-Q driver array. KEF calls this its Single Apparent Source technology. The positionin
