KEF History - The 1960s
KEF was founded in 1961 by an electrical engineer named Raymond Cooke in a Nissen Hut on the premises of a metal working operation called Kent Engineering & Foundry (hence KEF), on the banks of the River Medway, near Maidstone in Kent.
From the beginning KEF was destined to become a company with a flair for the unusual and controversial in terms of loudspeaker engineering, design and use of materials.
Within a year, KEF, under Cooke's outstanding vision, was planning loudspeakers of a three-way design with bass and midrange units using foil-stiffened, vacuum-formed, expanded polystyrene diaphragms with a Melinex or Mylar tweeter. This idea was manifested in the K1, an immediate success, followed by the bookshelf model, Celeste, a loudspeaker with an even more significant commercial success and one that helped secure the early financial stability of the new company.
Re-establishing a previous relationship with the BBC in 1966, Cooke was interested in adopting another material, Neoprene (an artificial rubber) to help maintain sound quality in the mid-band by using it as the surround to the loudspeaker diaphragm, while using new materials for the diaphragm itself. Cooke was always looking for new materials at this time and, in fact, settled on Bextrene as a solution, as its lightweight plastic sheet-like properties were flexible enough for shaping and the material remained stable under varying temperature and moisture conditions and was smooth and consistent over a wide bandwidth.
As a result, in 1967, two new drive units, the 5" B110 and 8" B200 appeared which, with their countless applications, found use in some 3 million units from KEF and many other loudspeaker brands throughout the world. A new, smaller tweeter also arrived, the T27, which led to the most famous BBC/KEF collaboration, the LS3/5a, of which some 2 million units were sold world-wide. A 1997 version of this acclaimed design is still in production today!
During the 1960s KEF flourished. Loudspeakers such as the Concord, Concerto and Cresta and then, in 1969, the Chorale began to shape the company's growing reputation as the loudspeaker engineers, a fact justly recognized in 1970 when KEF received the first of two Queen's Awards for Export Achievement.