These standmounters set new standards at the price
View online review whf.cm/LS50Meta
Launched in 2012, the LS50 proved a huge success thanks to a combination of sound quality, build and aesthetics that remains highly appealing today. That hasn’t stopped the company’s engineers from having a fresh look, resulting in the LS50 Meta.
The Meta don’t look any different from the originals. The cabinet shape and size still works well, and the curved front panel – made of a polyester resin combined with glass fibre and calcium carbonate – continues to make for an impressively rigid and well-controlled foundation for the Uni-Q drive unit array, where the tweeter sits in the throat of the mid/bass unit – the one area ripe for improvement. This has been thoroughly reworked, taking in all the refinements KEF has developed over the decade and adding something new in the form of Metamaterial Absorption Technology (MAT).
MAT is KEF’s way of coping with the sound that comes off the back of the 25mm aluminium tweeter dome. Conventionally, this sound fires into a chamber behind the dome where it is mostly absorbed by damping material, but some sound energy always bounces back through the dome to add distortion.
Here, the rearward sound feeds into something about the size of an ice-hockey puck that looks like a plastic circular maze. It is layered and made up of 30 tubes, each tuned to absorb a different frequency. KEF claims that, once combined, the tubes absorb a wide range of frequencies – from around 600Hz upwards – much more effectively than alternate methods, with resulting cleaner, less distorted highs.
Grunt required
There have been tweaks to the crossover to take all the drive-unit changes into account. Aside from a slight shift in crossover frequency – from 2.2kHz to 2.1kHz – the specs look identical. These aren’t particularly sensitive speakers, at a rated 85dB/W/m, and the minimum impedance is just 3.5 ohms, so it makes sense to partner them with an amp that has a bit of grunt, such as the Cambridge CXA81 integrated, though you could easily use the likes of the Naim SuperNait 3, and the speakers wouldn’t be limiting.
Delicacy and precision
It doesn’t take long to realise that the LS50 have improved significantly. While the basic sonic character is instantly familiar, the new ones have gained a level of clarity and finesse the originals only hinted at.
Listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, we are soon marvelling at the LS50 Meta’s delicacy and precision. They sound so much more transparent than before and manage to render
