Headphones - KEF Speakers
Good quality headphones and earphones improve your enjoyment of music at home and on the move. We sell a carefully selected range, for listening to music via your hi-fi, iPhone, iPad, iPod, portable player, Mac, PC, laptop, tv, etc at a range of prices. We also have a dedicated headphones bar in our showroom and offer 0% finance on orders over £300.
KEF is a British speaker manufacturer developing industry-leading products for over 50 years. KEF has received a host of awards and stellar reviews and currently offers a wide range of hi-fi speakers and AV speakers.
The flagship KEF Blade and smaller KEF Blade 2 speakers are renowned for their excellence and superb reproduction, and their advanced pioneering technologies and Uni-Q Driver Array designs have filtered down into lots of KEF’s consumer-end products, such as the KEF LS50 wireless speakers.
In 1961, KEF was founded by Raymond Cooke OBE an ex-BBC Electrical Engineer and headquartered the company near Maidstone, Kent. The company was set on the banks of the River Medway in the premises of a former metal working company, Kent Engineering & Foundry. Overtime by experimenting with new technologies and materials, Cooke aimed to produce superior acoustic quality with recordings reproduced to the exact nature of the original performance.
KEF became the first company to utilise the stability of Bextrene as a cone material, which has since been incorporated in many drivers for many leading audiophile speakers. Another major breakthrough a few years later, KEF became the first to design and test loudspeakers with computer modelling leading the industry in the digital analysis of speakers. Their revolutionary work resulted in KEF being able to match speaker pairs to within half a dB for flawless audio reproduction.
KEF eventually went on to produce their signature technology, the Uni-Q point source driver array in the next decade using NASA-developed magnets that were ten times more powerful than conventional ones. KEF stayed ahead of the game in the nineties with the advent of 5.1 home cinema recording by creating the first dedicated centre speaker in the UK, the Model 100 benefiting from Uni-Q.
Through the years, they have been developing impressive expertise in the use of advanced acoustical, magnetic and mechanical modelling techniques such as Finite Element Analysis resulting in an accuracy that was not previously achievable. Kept under wraps since the 1980s, KEF revealed their ACE technology in 2005 demonstrating the advantages of activated carbon inside a compact speaker enclosure and its effect on internal volume and bass extension.
Now five decades from the company’s inception, KEF's scientific innovation and hands-on experimentation cements their ultimate audiophile reputation and allows them to continue to lead in developing products ahead of the market. We stock the complete KEF range, from the multimedia range (that includes active speakers, headphones and earphones) to the Q series range, LS50 range, both the wired and wireless LS50, R series range, KEF Reference range and KEF Blade, along with custom install speakers and 5.1 speaker packages for a home theatre experience.
We have a range of closed back design headphones, which offer impressive isolation and passive noise attenuation thanks to the nature of their design keeping the majority of your music in, and most external noise out. These are ideal for personal use, noisy environments and commuting.
Alternatively, open-back headphones are favoured by many due to their spacious and open sound profile, which comes about due to the open nature of their design. Open back headphones are primarily recommended for home use as the open design means sound is leaked, and so they are preferable in quiet environments.
With the popularity of portable music devices, the selection of earphones available has increased dramatically. We offer a range of earphones ranging from budget models designed to offer an improvement over standard giveaway earphones to high-end earphones designed to offer the performance of high-end headphones in a compact and portable package. Many earphones are of the in-ear variety – slotting into the ear canal, and offering excellent isolation and passive noise attenuation, enabling you to listen at quieter volumes and also use your earphones in noisy environments.
We also stock a range of headphone amplifiers, which offer dramatic improvements over the majority of standard headphone amplifiers featured in devices, computers or amplifiers. These amplifiers are designed specifically for use with headphones, and are unrivalled for detail, soundstage and precision when compared to similarly priced integrated solutions. We also stock a range of headphones accessories, ranging from headphones stands to spare earpads and headbands.