I asked Oclee-Brown, KEF’s Head of Acoustics, what the magical new feature affords. Since the metamaterial addition is the primary change in the new LS50, I will spend a fair amount of time discussing its construction and use in KEF’s latest iteration. The maze-like metamaterial is fabricated from injection-molded polymer. The structure, according to GP Acoustics* designers Sebastien Degraeve and Jack Oclee-Brown, is “.a continuum of acoustical resonators, tuned to have a constant number of resonances per octave above a cut-off frequency.” The disk, looking something like a diminutive labyrinth for insects, sits on an acoustically reflecting substrate. In the case of the LS50 Meta, the metamaterial takes the form of a quite small “unit-cell” structure repeated and nested in two dimensions to create a larger, disk-shaped region of material having highly optimized acoustical absorption properties. Metamaterials counterintuitively manage to bend the rules of received wisdom, by cleverly manipulating energy in novel and surprising ways. In brief, metamaterials are non-traditional physical materials and structures that are used to control the propagation of waves through and around them. The press release announced a new iteration of the LS50, this time with something novel to the industry the inclusion of metamaterial. Fast forward to October of 2020, and a press release arriving in my email. Writing up that show as my first article for audioXpress, I mentioned that “I got the briefest listen to some surprising speakers, like KEF’s LS50 (loved it a lot.).” Since that time, I’ve continued to hold the passive LS50 in high esteem as a performance benchmark in its price range. The company was set up in 2012 by three young entrepreneurs - Yang Min, Vincent Fong, and Chen Shuyu-who are in charge of research and development, business development, and manufacturing, respectively. The LS50 Collection update has allowed KEF to introduce the results of its first collaboration with Acoustic Metamaterials Group (AMG), a young company from Hong Kong researching the usage of metamaterials in noise control solutions.
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