KEF MUSIC LOUNGE THEATER: A THX CERTIFIED OASIS

The speaker maker’s appointment-only New Jersey demonstration theater combines comfort with state-of-the-art gear and acoustic treatments

- BOB ANKOSKO

AFTER ALMOST a year-and-a-half in lockdown, I was honored to be the first member of the press to experience the KEF Music Lounge Theater. In late May, I visited the company’s U.S. headquarters in Marlboro, NJ, and received a warm—and long overdue—Jersey welcome from KEF VP David Kroll and marketing director Stephanie Scola. Work on the theater was largely finished in February 2020 just weeks before the country went into lockdown so the magnificent space with its 9.10.6 Dolby Atmos speaker layout and 160-inch screen sat largely dormant for more than a year. As restrictions eased in the spring of this year, KEF was finally able to put the last piece of the puzzle in place when the theater received the official THX Certification.

The christening, as it turns out, couldn’t be more fitting as it aligns with the 60th anniversary of KEF’s founding. Raymond Cooke, an electrical engineer with a deep passion for music and an unwavering desire to design the perfect speaker, started the company near the country town of Maidstone, 32 miles southeast of London. Sixty years later, Cooke’s legacy lives on and is echoed in words he uttered decades ago:

“Of all art, music is the most indefinable and the most expressive, the most insubstantial and the most immediate, the most transitory and the most imperishable. Transformed to a dance of electrons along a wire, its ghost lives on. When KEF returns music to its rightful habituation, your ears and mind, they aim to do so in the most natural way they can ... without drama, without exaggeration, without artifice.”

If Cooke was here today, there’s little doubt that his dedication to reproducing music as it was meant to be heard would extend to movie soundtracks.