The KEF Concept Blade is Finally a Reality

Unless you regularly attend trade shows or frequent forums for speaker enthusiasts, KEF’s Concept Blade speaker may have slipped under your audio radar. The prototypes have been the darling of KEF‘s booths since their introduction in 2009. And since that introduction, the question on every journalist’s lips has been, “When are you guys and gals gonna make this thing for realsies?”

Apparently, we journalist types are going to have to come up with a new question for the KEF booth now, because the Blade has officially made its debut. “When are you gonna make this thing with a Lime Sorbet finish?” perhaps? No, wait… it looks like they’ve got that covered. Along with Gloss White and Gloss Black, Garnet, Sapphire, Grigio, Racing Red, Racing Blue, Pale Gold, Orange Sorbet, Graphite, Stardust, Lemon Sorbet, and Snow White, or any number of other custom finishes for its glass-reinforced composite cabinet.

So, what’s the big deal about the Blade? Well, for one thing, it’s gorgeous. For another, well… I’ll let KEF ‘splain it in their own words:

KEF’s Single Apparent Source ensures that individual driver sections – for bass (LF), midrange (MF) and treble (HF) – of a multi-way loudspeaker work together and produce sound-fields that appear to come from the same point and place, which is especially important at the crossover frequencies where the sound output switches between drivers. The Single Apparent Source is a perfect extension of the new, fully pistonic KEF Uni-Q® MF/HF array, and includes the bass drivers for the first time. Together they combine to form a seamless point source driver array that can handle the entire frequency range.

Four 9” (22.5 cm), newly developed bass drivers deliver the KEF Blade’s distortion-free low frequency response. The engineering principle behind their configuration is simple – let the huge forces of each moving cone cancel each other out by arranging them in opposed, symmetrical pairs – but its effective implementation is fraught with engineering obstacles. The force produced by the bass drivers is so strong that the massive rear magnets have had to be bonded directly to each other to obtain the full benefit of this technology. They are side firing so their acoustic center coincides with those of the all-new, latest generation Uni-Q midrange driver and tweeter – forming the ground breaking Single Apparent Source technology.

Price: $29,999

Contact info:
KEF
732.683.2356