The futuristic cones staring out from the front of KEF’s LS50W active speakers look like the spinner rims on a Mars rover. With lemon-juicer aluminum domes surrounded by 5.25-inch magnesium and aluminum-alloy moats, the cones are so visually striking it’d be silly to cover them up with a grille. And even though some of the available color combos are just plain gorgeous—red on gray, blue on black, and copper on white—they’re not there for looks.
Those handsome driver arrays are built around the Uni-Q technology that KEF has been honing for 28 years. Rather than have a tweeter and midrange driver mounted on separate vertical planes within the speaker cabinet, they’re set up like a hard-boiled egg yolk and egg white. That citrus-smashing bullseye? That’s the tweeter. It’s mounted right smack-dab in the middle of the midrange driver so that all the sound is coming from the same place.
And these aren’t just speakers, because they have a whole entertainment’s center worth of audio components hidden within them. Tucked inside each of the foot-deep cabinets is a pair of DACs, a DSP that supports 192kHz/24-bit audio, and a streaming preamp. The built-in driver amps blast out 200 watts, the tweeter amps give you another 30 watts. Those midrange drivers bottom out at 40Hz, so there’s a subwoofer output in case you need more bump.
While the LS50W units are brand-new, they’re a wireless riff on the LS50 wired speakers released five years ago. All those built-in components are new, and they’re quite a bit bulkier than the LS50s due to all the tech stuffed inside.
So basically, you just plug these things in and you’re ready to go. They sync up to one another wirelessly, and you can stream music to them over Bluetooth (with AptX) or dual-band Wi-Fi. Around the back, there are optical, RCA, Ethernet, and USB inputs. And of course there’s an app to adjust the system’s equalizer settings and optimize its performance based on the speakers’ placement in your listening palace.
Just in case you were praying the LS50W’s combination of aesthetics, built-in tech, and much-lauded audio performance was cheap, here’s some bad news: No dice. At $2,200 per pair, at least you’re getting a lot of home-audio components built right in. And you’ve got until December to save up for them, because that’s when they’ll be available.
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