KEF Blade Unvelied

KEF has announced the introduction of the KEF Blade, an engineering tour de force, and the result of five year's exhaustive testing, expert analysis and intricate experimentation by the UK based research and development team.

At the heart of the KEF Blade is its Single Apparent Source technology. For highest quality sound reproduction the individual driver sections (for bass, midrange and treble) of a multi-way loudspeaker must work together and need to produce sound-fields that appear to come from the same point in space. This is particularly important at the crossover frequencies where the sound output switches from one driver to another. The Single Apparent Source technology is a perfect extension of the new, fully pistonic KEF Uni-Q^® MF/HF array, which brings the bass drivers into the picture for the first time. Together they combine to form a seamless point source driver array handling the entire frequency range.

Four 9” (22.5cm), 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 centre coincides with those of the all-new, latest generation Uni-Q midrange driver and tweeter – this is the ground breaking Single Apparent Source technology. The result means that the entire frequency range is radiated from one point in space. It is impossible to determine where one driver stops working and the next begins, meaning that the resulting sound-field is astonishingly convincing

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All this technology is housed in a rigid and heavy cabinet made from polished glass reinforced composite. The parabolic curvature of the enclosure increases cabinet rigidity even further and the drivers are fully decoupled, meaning that sound is only generated from driver movement and not from the cabinet.