I remember this autumnal day in 2017 like it was yesterday. Following an ill-timed holiday, during which the rest of the What Hi-Fi? reviews team had received and tested the KEF LS50 Wireless, I walked into our hi-fi test room, then in Twickenham, and found the two speakers hooked up playing music. I’d read about these “wireless LS50s” since they were announced the November prior, but here they were in front of me for the first time – just two regular-sized speaker cabinets plugged into the power sockets behind them, and to one another via an ethernet cable; no extra transmitter box, no source physically tethered to them. Where was this music coming from? ‘Only’ Bluetooth, I would discover as I approached them and peered at their top-panel input display, though their killer feature was undoubtedly built-in wi-fi and network streaming.
While we as a team had come across, and reviewed, powered and active speakers from the likes of Dynaudio, Dali, Linn and Meridian before, we were all in agreement that none of them had combined such an assortment of features in such an elegant and accessible (~£2000/$2000/AU$4000) two-box format – primarily as they hadn’t integrated wi-fi streaming, either at all or as smartly.
