June 10, 2022

Short and Sweet: Uni-Q Solves A Problem

Ever wonder why you’re not getting the most out of your speakers? It might be a problem finding the acoustic sweet spot. It’s simple: if a sound leaves a loudspeaker at the same time from different locations, it arrives at your ears at different times. Naturally, this changes the quality of the sound for everyone listening outside of a very narrow ‘sweet spot’.

That’s where Uni-Q^®️ comes in. Our KEF Uni-Q^®️ driver array sits at the heart of almost all our speakers, and essentially eliminates the sweet spot by placing the tweeter precisely at the acoustic centre of the bass and midrange cone. This allows both to act together as a single point source, dispersing sound more evenly throughout the room.

The result? The same natural, detailed sound for everyone and anyone in the room.

The Problem of the Acoustic Sweet Spot

In a standard loudspeaker array, your music is only pure in one narrow area: the acoustic sweet spot.

A singer may produce fundamental frequencies anywhere between 250 Hz and 1,000 Hz, with some facets of her voice going as high as 6,000 Hz. No single driver can reproduce those frequencies; we need a bass driver, mid-range driver and high-frequency driver – all working in concert – to reproduce the human voice (and pretty much every other sound). To make things even more difficult, the higher the frequency, the more directional the sound – further complicating the acoustic sweet spot.

When you’re listening to music, the singers’ voice comes from one point in space – a point source. And so, to capture the magic and majesty of a performance we need to listen back the same way.

KEF Uni-Q^®: Every Spot is the Best Spot

With Uni-Q^®️'s 160-degree dispersion, everyone gets to sit in the sweet spot.

Since 1988, KEF’s engineers have researched how to solve this fundamental problem in audio reproduction. The Uni-Q^®️ is the recognized leader in reproducing audio the way it was meant to sound – that’s the whole point after all, isn’t it?

Thanks to Uni-Q^®️’s single point source design, all frequencies reach your ears at the same time. That means sound is less distorted, and more accurate and realistic than conventional loudspeakers. But most importantly – with Uni-Q^®️, where you sit is no longer the main consideration for what you hear.