KEF Handed a Speaker to a Sculptor. Here's What Came Back.

Most wireless speakers are designed to disappear. They come in matte grey or matte white, they are roughly the shape of a loaf, and the industrial-design brief was plainly "do not frighten the sofa". KEF have just done the opposite. The LS LUXE is a wireless system you are meant to look at, and the man responsible for how it looks is Ross Lovegrove.

That name will mean something to anyone who has stood in front of a pair of Muon. Lovegrove has designed for KEF since 2005, and his cabinets — the Muon and the Muo among them — have always argued that a loudspeaker can be a piece of sculpture that happens to make sound, rather than a black box you apologise for. The LS LUXE brings that thinking to a wireless, active speaker for the first time. It is, unmistakably, an object first.

Lovegrove himself is not shy about the ambition. "When I'm designing," he has said of the KEF work, "I don't see it as a technological object. I see it as something that needs to touch the soul." You can take that as sculptor's poetry if you like. But there is a good deal of engineering underneath it, and the engineering is the more interesting story.

The clever bit is at the bottom end

The headline technology in the LS LUXE is called VECO — Velocity Control Technology — and KEF claim it is a first in a wireless HiFi speaker. Here is what it actually does, stripped of the marketing.

A bass driver is asked to move a cone precisely in step with the music. As you turn the volume up, it stops managing that. The cone starts to compress and lag, and what should be a clean note turns woolly. It is the single most common way a small speaker gives itself away.

VECO puts a sensor on the driver that measures how the cone is genuinely moving, in real time, and feeds that back to a current-drive amplifier that compares the movement against the signal and corrects the difference on the spot. The speaker is, in effect, watching itself play bass and fixing its own mistakes in real time. The promise is deeper, tighter, more defined low frequencies than a 6.5-inch driver has any business producing — control that holds up when the room gets loud rather than falling apart.

The rest of the specification is familiar KEF, done properly. There is a 12th-generation Uni-Q driver, which sits the tweeter inside the mid-bass cone so the two behave as one source and the good seat in the room stops being a single cushion. Behind it sits MAT, the metamaterial maze that soaks up 99% of the sound fired backwards off the tweeter, which is sound that would otherwise come back through the cone as grain. And a pair of amplifiers per speaker — 280 watts of Class D for the bass, 100 watts of Class A/B up top — drive the whole thing without a separate box in sight.

Three finishes, and a stand worth having

The LS LUXE comes in three finishes — Dusk Titanium, Eclipse Black and Mineral White — at £3,500 a pair, and the shape rewards being put on its dedicated S-LUXE floor stands (£800 a pair) rather than crammed onto a shelf, where the low-diffraction cabinet can do its job and the sculpture can actually be seen. Add a KEF subwoofer if your room is large or your taste in bass is immoderate; the KW1 kit links one in without a cable across the carpet. Streaming is the usual comprehensive KEF spread — Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify, high-resolution up to 384kHz — plus HDMI eARC, so it earns its keep under a television as readily as between a pair of listening chairs.

Hear it in Norwich

Marketing copy for a speaker like this leans hard on the word luxury. We would rather you ignored the word and listened to the bass. When our LS LUXE demonstration is ready, the thing worth hearing is what VECO does to a bassline you know well, played back to back against the LS50 Wireless II. Bring the record you would use to catch a speaker out. You can see everything we stock from KEF online, but this is not a speaker to choose from a screen. Come to Ber Street and let it prove itself.