KEF (other)

KEF is a British company specialising in the design and production of a range of high-end audio products, including HiFi speakers, subwoofers, architecture speakers, wireless speakers, and headphones. It was founded in Maidstone, Kent in 1961 by a BBC engineer named Raymond Cooke (1925–1995).

KEF is named after its original site, Kent Engineering and Foundry. Product development, acoustical technology research and the manufacture of signature products still occurs at the original Maidstone site in England. KEF was the first loudspeaker manufacturer in the world to implement the use of computers in loudspeaker design and measurement. KEF introduced the world's first coincident source speaker driver called Uni-Q in 1988 which has evolved to 12th generation since then, and it is still featured in almost all its speakers today. KEF is the first company to use metamaterial to absorb the unwanted sound from the rear of speaker driver in HiFi industry, the technology is called Metamaterial Absorption Technology (MAT).

KEF has received over 300 awards and holds more than 150 patents. KEF also published more than 50 academic papers and has received two Queen's Awards for Export Achievement.

History

1960s

Raymond Cooke and Robert Pearch founded KEF Electronics Ltd., with a view to creating innovative loudspeakers using the latest in materials technology. KEF Electronics was founded in Kent in 1961 and was physically situated on land adjacent to the River Medway in Tovil which at the time was owned by ''Kent Engineering & Foundry'' (a company owned by Robert Pearch and founded by his father Leonard) who at the time manufactured agricultural equipment and industrial sweeping machines. KEF derived its name from the firm.Marks, John (10 February 2012)
"Book Review: KEF: 50 Years of Innovation in Sound"
''Stereophile''.

Cooke was a Royal Navy WWII veteran who was a design engineer at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for a year. He was later Technical Director at Wharfedale, then a leading British loudspeaker manufacturer. Following corporate change at Wharfedale, Cooke left to see his own ideas put into action. Cooke acquired the site of a foundry, makers of agricultural machines, and initially worked in Nissen huts erected on the site in Tovil, Maidstone. In ''KEF: 50 Years of Innovation in Sound'', the authors assert that KEF reduced the average size of bass-rich home loudspeakers from to about , based on the work on the "acoustic-suspension woofer" at Acoustic Research; the company pioneered large-scale production of drivers with cones made of materials other than paper, and the application of fast Fourier transform analysis to the measuring of loudspeakers. KEF was also an early-adopter of modern quality-control principles to driver manufacture.

The first loudspeaker manufactured was the K1 Slimline for which the drive units used diaphragms made of polystyrene and melinex. Soon after, in 1962, came the famous B139 'racetrack' shaped woofer which allowed the design of the ''Celeste'' – one of the first truly high performance bookshelf loudspeakers. As Laurie Fincham, Cooke's successor as chief engineer, later revealed, the only reason the B139 was vertically mounted ovoid-shaped was that the British tax code at the time penalised 2 way speakers below a certain arbitrary width. Professional products were not taxed and professional was defined as above 8 inches for a woofer or as a 3 way speaker.

From the mid-1960s, KEF manufactured BBC
...