The Blade speakers from KEF are one of the big talking points of the show, with every visitor and trade attendee seeming to have a pretty firm opinion of the company's 'Concept' design.
Here are the speakers on demonstration in the room KEF is sharing with Arcam at the show, the two having the same distributor here in Germany.
It gives you a better idea of the size of the speakers; that's an Arcam CD37 and Mark Levinson amplification on the floor between them.
We had a full technical briefing on the speakers: above, WHFSV Technical Editor Ketan Bharadia (centre) gets the lowdown on the some materials technology from KEF's Head of Group Research, Mark Dodd (right), watched with interest by Marantz Brand Ambassador Ken Ishiwata, visiting the KEF room.
This is the new Uni-Q treble and midrange driver used on the front of the Blade speaker, while below is one of the two twin-bass-driver modules fitted in the enclosure, showing how the opposed bass drivers are mounted.
Finally. here's the hefty offboard crossover used for these 'statement' speakers; note the size of those components, used to split the signal from the amplifier into the three sets of input terminals.
