Book RevIew
KEF: 50 Years of Innovation in Sound, by Ken Kessler and Dr Andrew Watson. A must-read for any audiophile or speaker desigher!
There have been many great loudspeakers built since the dawn of high fidelity and more than a few great loudspeaker manufacturers. But only one could truly be called legendary, and that’s KEF. And that’s because KEF established the foundations for modern loudspeakers: the ones we all listen to today. It did so by operating at the forefront of technology, developing materials and manufacturing techniques that would be copied by its competitors right around the world; and by investing huge amounts of money not only into materials research and automation, but also into fundamental loudspeaker design and measurement science. It also became famous for employing engineers who were (or would become) household (and hallowed) names in the world of loudspeaker design and research: designers such as Laurie Fincham, Mike Gough, Andrew Jones, Richard Small, and Andrew Watson to name but a few. But the most famous person at KEF was none other than its founder, Raymond Cooke, OBE (1925–95), because without his vision for the future of loudspeaker technology, and his unswerving dedication to pursuing it, KEF would not be the company it is today.
Given the importance of Cooke in KEF’s history, it’s significant that this enormous (it’s 305×305mm and 22mm thick) and very handsome coffee-table book, which traces the history of KEF from even before its beginning in 1961 through to its 50th anniversary in 2011, does not have Cooke as its focus. Instead co-authors Ken Kessler and Andrew Watson concentrate on the people who worked at KEF, from the women who wound voicecoils (initially by hand) to the engineers who hand-coded programs when KEF became the first company in the world to use computers in the design process. Later, it would be the first manufacturer to use computers to measure the performance of finished loudspeakers. KEF was also certainly the first to use materials other than paper as cone material. At times, the company was so far ahead of the game that it was ahead even of itself, with Mark Burdett recalling that after realising the significance of computer-aided drafting in production, Cooke had invested in a 3D CAD modelling program so advanced that no-one in the company knew how to use it. ‘I started teaching myself during my lunch hour,’ Burdett recalls.
For me, the true beauty of this book is that despite its emphasis on the technicalities and minutiae of loudspeaker design and manufacturing, it reveals why—despite all the technology that’s available to assist today’s loudspeaker designers—loudspeaker design remains an art even to this day. It accomplishes this by means of extensive (and highly readable… though sometimes highly technical) interviews with dozens of designers and engineers who worked for KEF, some of whom still work there, as well as interviews with the ‘hands-on’ employees who were, in the end, responsible for building the speakers on the production line. The book also reveals the industrial espionage that went on in the industry (and probably still does). Of course it’s also a true reference work, containing, as it does, comprehensive data about every finished loudspeaker KEF ever made, as well as every drive unit. Extensively illustrated, it contains photographs of every one of KEF’s most famous hi-fi loudspeaker systems, right up to the famous Blade. My only criticism could be of the rather dull ‘black on black’ book cover, which doesn’t give any idea of how exciting a book it really is. Jutta Dziwnik
The true beauty of this book is that it reveals why loudspeaker design remains an art ... even to this day