The cabinet is the product here, and I don't mean that as an insult. Ross Lovegrove did the Muon, KEF handed him these, and the shape is what you are actually paying the premium for. Everything else is a careful iteration on a speaker they already sell.
Under the sculpting it is the 12th generation Uni-Q, a 6.5 inch aluminium woofer and a 1 inch aluminium dome, with MAT behind the tweeter and 280 watts of class D on the bass plus 100 watts of class A/B on the treble. The two genuinely new bits are VECO, which watches driver movement and corrects it in real time, and their Current Drive amplification. Both are distortion reduction stories rather than new capability, which matches the review verdict that this does not make the LS50 Wireless II obsolete despite sitting roughly a thousand dollars above it.
Where it gets interesting for this forum is HDMI eARC and a subwoofer output, because that turns a hi-fi pair into a very expensive but very tidy TV audio answer. Two boxes, no rack, no receiver. If your room is a living room and a soundbar has always felt like a downgrade, that is a real proposition.
The bit I would want to think about is inputs. HDMI, optical, coax, ethernet and a 3.5mm analog jack, and that is the wired list. No RCA in, no phono stage. Turntable owners are buying a preamp and an adapter on day one, and everything else in the house has to go through the TV or the network.
Would you put four grand into a pair of speakers whose streaming platform is soldered to them, or keep the boxes separate so you can replace the one that ages first?
Under the sculpting it is the 12th generation Uni-Q, a 6.5 inch aluminium woofer and a 1 inch aluminium dome, with MAT behind the tweeter and 280 watts of class D on the bass plus 100 watts of class A/B on the treble. The two genuinely new bits are VECO, which watches driver movement and corrects it in real time, and their Current Drive amplification. Both are distortion reduction stories rather than new capability, which matches the review verdict that this does not make the LS50 Wireless II obsolete despite sitting roughly a thousand dollars above it.
Where it gets interesting for this forum is HDMI eARC and a subwoofer output, because that turns a hi-fi pair into a very expensive but very tidy TV audio answer. Two boxes, no rack, no receiver. If your room is a living room and a soundbar has always felt like a downgrade, that is a real proposition.
The bit I would want to think about is inputs. HDMI, optical, coax, ethernet and a 3.5mm analog jack, and that is the wired list. No RCA in, no phono stage. Turntable owners are buying a preamp and an adapter on day one, and everything else in the house has to go through the TV or the network.
Would you put four grand into a pair of speakers whose streaming platform is soldered to them, or keep the boxes separate so you can replace the one that ages first?
