KEF IQ9 Floorstanding Speakers

Once in a while, the Tech2 lab gets a chance to play host to some expensive piece of high-end gear. Such products may be targeted at the upper segment of the market, but it's a segment that has become very active in this space.

KEF is more than 20 years old as a brand in the UK, and has a wide range of speakers and audio equipment to stir audiophiles and regular consumers alike. It released the IQ9 floorstanding speakers recently, and as these have already tickled the fancy of reviewers and audio publications worldwide, we too decided to join the fun.

After all, the speakers are present in the Indian market, and there are people who are willing to spend a small fortune on them – if they think the equipment is worth it. And that 'worthiness' is what we intend to gauge…

Design and Features

The speakers come in a black cabinet, which has a oblong curved continuous shape. The material has a nice woodgrain finish, and the cabinet displays a very mild shine due to the polished wood feel.

The speakers are bi-wirable, which means you can connect the high frequency driver and the low frequency driver separately to your amp. They contain good quality connector binding posts at the lower back end, encased in transparent plastic.

The configuration of the speaker is three-way bass-reflex, meaning three driver segments for three sections of frequency.

A unique thing is that the tweeter and the midrange drivers are coaxially placed, in a proprietary feature that KEF calls UNI-Q design. A ¾" aluminum-dome tweeter is placed at the center of a midrange cone, which in turn is a 6.5" titanium-coated polypropylene-cone midrange unit to cover the 280Hz – 2.8kHz range.

The speakers also have two 6.5" low-frequency drivers, each in its own slot with its own front-loaded bass port. The use of smaller woofers will theoretically improve power handling, and enhance speed and timing as well. But will really low frequencies be audible? We’d need to check.

The use of the UNI-Q configuration, according to the designers at KEF, results in broad dispersion of the mid and high frequencies and eliminates narrowed dispersion. The use of two separate bass ports for each woofer driver, aligned vertically on top of each other, increases the bass radiating surface area, which I hope won’t cause any masking or unwanted enhancement of the lows.