KEF LS50 WIRELESS II

And now for something a little different. The KEF LS50 Wireless II is an all-in-one speaker system with streaming smarts and built-in amplification which requires no other boxes than the two familiar KEF LS50 stereo speakers you see here.

₹3,46,000

The LS50 Wireless launched in 2016 as an active speaker system take on KEF’s legendary passive LS50 speakers – a pair of wireless stereo speakers packed with built-in amplification and streaming smarts – and their impressive execution of this appealing concept earned them a five-star review and a What Hi-Fi? Award.

They weren’t perfect: they came with some control app hiccups; and the need for a cable to connect the two speakers was a small blip in an otherwise neat package. But not only are the new LS50 Wireless II speakers untethered, they also come with a new and improved app.

The Wireless II don’t simply address their predecessor’s imperfections, though. They have been designed to squeeze even more performance out of the familiar chassis and Uni-Q driver arrangement through the introduction of a new KEF innovation called Metamaterial Absorption Technology (MAT).

MAT’s the way to do it

Essentially, MAT is a clever way of absorbing sound waves that radiate from the rear of the tweeter dome so that they don’t distort the unit’s forward output. Physically, this technique sees a round piece of plastic with a maze-like structure placed behind the tweeter.

Each ‘path’ in the structure is a certain size and length and ‘tuned’ to absorb a specific range of frequencies. KEF says that, together, the various paths effectively act as an ‘acoustic black hole’, absorbing 99 per cent of the unwanted sound.