KEF XQ5 Loudspeakers

Soundstaging magic from a legendary British speaker maker.

KEF has been around for over fifty years and some audiophiles may need to be reminded just how good many of its speakers are. In the 1960s and 70s, KEF was among a small group of companies at the forefront of loudspeaker and driver innovation. Their drivers found their ways into millions (yes, millions) of high-performance speakers of the day, besides KEF’s own, as well as countless DIY speaker projects. It’s also easy to forget that KEF collaborated with the BBC on the classic and very popular LS3/5a which sold more than 2 million units, a staggering number for highend audio. KEF helped pioneer concepts, exemplified in its breakthrough Reference 105 loudspeaker in 1977, such as time aligning each dynamic driver to ensure phase coherence and using individual enclosures for each to reduce resonance. After what seemed like a lull, KEF launched products, starting in 1988, with a radical Uni-Q driver, where a small, lightweight tweeter was fitted within the midrange woofer driver’s pole piece at the acoustic center of the larger cone. Where it took some work to make KEF’s earlier designs image well, the Q-series drivers were said to improve imaging dramatically, making superb soundstaging easy to achieve. When I received KEF’s XQ5 floorstanders, I wondered whether KEF’s most recent generation of Q-driver technology, where the drivers use a Faraday ring to increase output and reduce midrange distortion, would pay sonic dividends in a speaker priced just under $3K.

To get right to the point, the KEF XQ5s have the broadest and deepest soundstaging of any full-range, dynamic speaker I have heard under $3K, approaching the performance of far more expensive speaker systems. While most loudspeakers around this price can produce credible if somewhat shallow soundstages, with lateral imaging that extends between—but not beyond—the speakers, the KEF XQ5s and a few others can produce huge soundstages with excellent depth and width. You can close your eyes and picture the performers arrayed across an almost rectangular stage. Images float nicely in space, which is a lot of fun on all kinds of music. If soundstaging is at the top of your priority list, and you don’t have the scratch for expensive omnidirectionals, these speakers may be just the ticket. Driver coherence is another of the XQ5’s many strengths, an area where they came close to the performance of my reference electrostatics, except for an occasional touch of midbass ripeness. The XQ5s also scored well on several other important sonic criteria such as image focus, transient quickness throughout the entire range, and soaring highs.

KEF’s attention to detail, save for the manual, reminds me of what one gets when purchasing more costly speakers. Packaging is first rate and protects the XQ5s’ lovely enclosures, as well as the delicate super-tweeters that are mounted on top of the curved cabinets. If you can’t get approval to put these speakers in the living room, you’ve got a real problem. My pair came finished in beautiful graphite lacquer, but the cabinets represent more than pretty pieces of furniture as their curved shape and internal bracing help reduce resonances. KEF also supplies high-quality hardware to place the speaker on either a rug or on hardwood floors—a nice touch. After reviewing a string of European speakers with CE-approved terminals, which are a pain in the neck, I welcomed the “spade-friendly” dual five-way binding posts on the KEFs. With all these conveniences, I was surprised that KEF didn’t provide more information in the XQ5’s manual. Describing it as terse would be an understatement, but the pictures serve as decent guides.

Upon removing the grille cloth, you’ll notice three 6.5" drivers which all appear to be the same, helping to account for the speakers’ coherence and transient speed. However, the top one, the Q-driver, also contains a tweeter mounted at its center, which enables the speaker to generate a lot of output from a single point source. Moreover, it also helps facilitate horizontal and vertical dispersion, meaning you don’t have to be locked into a single seat with your head in a vice to get a broad soundstage. Surprisingly, you can even move about the room and still enjoy a reasonable semblance of the 3D soundstage you’d hear from the center seat. The KEFs seem to be ideal for multi-listener and home theater situations.

Broad soundstaging can slightly impact image focus, making instruments such as the guitar on John Kay’s (the lead singer of Steppenwolf) engaging solo effort Heretics and Privateers [Crosscut Records] or Yehudi Menuhin’s violin on the Brahms Violin Concerto [EMI/Fenn Music/Hi Q Records] sound somewhat larger than life. However, on well-recorded piano recordings such as Kabi Laretei’s performance of music from Bergman films [Proprius], imaging was rock solid and in proportion to the rest of the stage. I would rate the XQ5’s image focus as very good.