The Audiophiliac

You have to see them for real.

(Credit: KEF)

KEF, one of Britain's leading speaker manufacturers, had a press event earlier this week in New York City to show off their new Muon speakers. I was curious to see the speaker in the flesh, and now that I have I can say the pictures don't do it justice. They are the most beautiful speakers I've ever seen.

Designed by Ross Lovegrove (a top industrial designer), they are indeed works of 21 century art, fabricated from malleable sheets of heated aluminum. The process was required to produce the Muon's complex curves, dictated by the design's acoustical properties, and of course, Lovegrove's aesthetics. The raw material, starting out as six foot long hunks of aluminum are milled and formed over a one week period. I couldn't keep my fingers off the undulating, thoroughly sensual surfaces. Best of all the shape is said to be in large part responsible for the speaker's extraordinary sound. Each Muon weighs 253 pounds.

They are great sounding speakers, with prodigious bass response, awesome dynamic range, and great finesse on classical music, but they are more than that. The Muon is a work of art. The markets for high-end everything are booming--cars, boats, watches, clothes, even refrigerators and stoves--it's about time audio manufacturers started making exquisite products for the rich and famous. The Muon NYC premier took place in a lavishly appointed penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, and the speakers looked right at home. In fact, when I stop and think about it, a plain Jane Bose system would have stood out like a sore thumb. It never ceases to amaze me that the folks who live well rarely seek out state of the art audio.

Wireless speakers usually come with a lot of wires.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Fact is, all of the wireless speakers I've reviewed for CNET still use speaker wires to do what speaker wires always do, deliver audio signals from power amplifiers to the speakers. And since wireless speakers have built-in power amplifiers, they need to be plugged into an AC wall outlet. So where a standard speaker has one wire, the wireless speaker has at least two! The "wireless" part refers to the system's ability to wirelessly transmit audio signals from the front of the room to the surround speakers.

The two wireless transmission systems, infrared and radio frequency, are fraught with problems. They all too frequently add noise, hiss, and pops--and when they're not adding those nasties--they just quit entirely and the sound cuts out. Infrared systems beam light from a transmitter, usually placed somewhere near the A/V receiver or home theater in a box DVD player, to the wireless speakers (so there must be a clear line of sight between the transmitter and the speakers). Depending on the room's physical layout, that may or may not be easy to implement. Radio frequency systems get around that hassle, but can have noise and radio frequency interference problems of their own.

Oh, and for the most part wireless speakers are pretty lame sounding speakers. They're typically woofers only, one-way systems--eliminating the tweeter gets around some of the noise problems associated with wireless speakers--and always at the cost of eliminating treble detail. Hi-fi they're not.

KEF's Universal Kit.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Now, that's I've totally trashed the wireless fantasy, there's one wireless system that I can get behind, KEF's Universal Wireless Kit. The "universal" tag refers to the kit's ability to be used with almost any speakers: big ones, small ones, you name it. I used the kit with my high-end Dynaudio Contour 1.1 speakers, and came away impressed with the wireless KEF's sonics. That said, even the KEF system comes with a big mess 'o' wires. Reality bites.