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As the East Coast KEF Blade dealer, we would like to congratulate Audio Visions for setting up a spectacular demo of the unique KEF Blade loudspeakers! Audio Visions is one of my favorite audio shops in the US, their range of superb products and passion, and just plain niceness, makes this review more than warranted.

We just received our Blades about two weeks ago, and they do require some care in placement, and feeding, however, if you get things just right with the Blade they reward you by doing some astonishing things:

The speed and clarity of the Blades is truly amazing, the Blades create an enormous, panoramic, soundstage that seems to wrap around and completely envelope the listener.  The size and depth of the Blade’s image is equally remarkable.

When you combine the Blades marvelous sound staging abilities with the speakers’ seemingly unlimited dynamic range, you can easily believe you are listening to a huge state of art reference speaker system from Magico or Wilson, at 2-3 times the Blades price!

We are using our Blades with either Chord or Electrocompaniet electronics with an Esoteric K03 or AMR CD 77.1 front ends.

We would love any interested East Coast residents to come to our shop to hear for themselves this new masterpiece from KEF.

Thank you Jason Serinus for acknowledging Kef’s accomplishments in creating the Blade.

Sincerely,

Dave Lalin, President, Audio Doctor, www.audiodoctor.com

Nice article, Jason! Great to see your writing here again. 

I bought my first pair of Dynaudios from Marlon (the gent at the far right) at Audio Visions SF. 

The black finish shows some smears and drips. 

But I was really looking forward to a bikini instead....

The Kef Blade will be on display at AXPONA 2012 March 9-11 in Jacksonville with The House OF Stereo. We also have the debut of several new Carver products, Symphony performances for half price directly across the street, A very upscale Art Show presented by a local Museum and a chance to get introduced to Transcendental Meditation and info on the David Lynch Foundation. Don't miss this exciting chance to see the Blade and all the other extras.

April absolutely rocks that dress.

Wow, oh, and I guess the speakers are nice looking and sounding.

Does April set up and install them if you buy them?

I was right behind you... AVSF ruined the setup of these speakers... As you pointed out during the demo (and a number of people agreed), there was a noticable bias to the left channel because they set up the left channel directly firing into another enormous shiny sound-reflecting floorstanding speaker. Where was the right speaker? Directly firing into a 5x3 square of sound attenuating foam. You can see the speaker behind April in the first picture, and the foam behind the plaid employee in the second. Not "Single Apparent Source" speakers set up like this...

A fair number of people left during the demo. No wow factor and certainly no low end. I doubt this was the room's fault.

As the East Coast Kef Blade dealer, Audio Doctor, with a pair of Blades currently on display, I think I can adequately reply to some of these comments. I did not get to hear AVSF setup but I know from my pair what the Blades can do  and how they have to be setup.

The Kef Blades do require meticulous setup, which is also warranted with other reference speakers, however, the design of the Blades woofers being so far off the ground creates a very tight, articulate bass response, with no floor boundary reinforcement, and this is a sound that most people are not used to hearing.

When you listen to a speaker without that extra round bass quality it makes the speakers seem a little lean.

My gut tells me that if you can couple a great subwoofer to add a certain degree of bass warmth and extension to the already fantastic accurate and articulate bass response that the Blades already produce, the combination is going to be killer, and I mean $70,000-$100,000.00 loudspeaker performance for $34,000.00!

When I first got my pair in I ran them for a few days and I kept waiting for the magic to kick in, it didn't. Then I tried different amplifiers, swapping power conditioners, and power cables, room tuning devices, and then finally cables before I started to get real magic out of the Blades.

The final ingredient came in the form of a new and exotic handmade cable my neighbor Clement Perry of Stereo times, brought back from CES and was raving about, which was a $9,000.00 speaker cable from a company I never heard of Klee Acoustics. I put this cable in my system and the change was startling, finally the Blades bass was there, the soundstage seemed to wrap around me, and the sound was finally coming alive.

I am not saying that the Blades are more or less finicky than anything else, but I looked at the room pictures from AVSF setup and I would think that this room would be not the best for the Blades or for any speakers. One having all of those racks right behind the speakers is going to create a diffusive surface and two you may not be coupling the room to the speakers optimally where the speakers had to be placed.

As a retailer with many, many, products on display, you can't always achieve retailing perfection, so sometimes you have to endure compromises, so with AVSF or any other dealer demo especially one done for a press event, you have to cut the dealer a wee bit of slack, as the conditions they might have had to create in order to present the speakers to a large group may have compromised their ideal setup.

I would encourage you to go back and listen  to them again, after AVSF has had more time to setup up the speakers optimally and then, you might have a different opinion of them.

All I know is after a few weeks’ worth of work my Blades are starting to sound extremely realistic and in some ways just startling. These are very impressive and unique loudspeakers.

I would like to point out that even in terrible conditions like this past CEDIA (even the sound rooms weren't very consistent), the KEF Blade still showed amazing potential simply based on the high-volume demo they had. Driven by very high-output gear (Parasound HALO) it didn't seem to break a sweat at high levels. I was very impressed.

...tall, slim, sleek and fabulously dawned in black, sophisticated and appearing most technically capable, Yes, April does rock that dress gentlemen! and on a second look it appears that the Kef blade is doing a somewhat reasonable job of trying to hold its own in the company of the pretty lady.

I have enjoyed Kef speakers since the early eighties and have two rooms equipped with them to this day.  I'll have to say that this showing peaks my interest.

Happy Listening!

I returned to AudioVision SF a few days ago to take another listen to the Blade. This time, it was set up on the room's long wall. Although it's impractical for the store to stage public demos with gear set up along that wall, it certainly produces a different sound.

Paired with Naim electronics and Nordost cabling, the system sounded superb from top to bottom. Heard nearfield, the soundstage was impressively large. The bottom may not go very deep - KEF's measurements claim the speaker is flat to 40 Hz, then drops off - but everything I heard was absolutely in control and beautifully focused. There was no trace of bass booming.

I look forward to hearing the Blade again at AXPONA in Jacksonville March 9-11, and to reading a review in the pages of Stereophile.

jason

I can see twin blades at the first photo, one black & one blonde...