Once unboxed and installed, the KEFs make some aspects of their performance clear from the outset. This is an impressively sensitive set of speakers that don’t need a huge amount of power to be driven to usefully cinematic levels. KEF’s work on the bass radiators across the front has clearly delivered on their intention of making these speakers easy to drive and benign in terms of impedance and the like. Given the squeeze being put on amp manufacturers to give us more channels for the same price – splitting the budget available as they do so – having a set of speakers that can do more with less seems like solid business practise.
There is also the same exceptional sense of three dimensionality that the stereo pair of Q350s demonstrated. The fight in the building stairwell in Suicide Squad is very well handled, the KEFs don’t seek to change its fundamentally chaotic nature but there is a logic to how it takes events and moves them from speaker to speaker that is useful for locking the information on screen and making it more logical at the same time. The panning of material across the front three speakers in particular is stunningly even and exceptionally cohesive. With five main speakers, the information shift is excellent and with seven speakers it would be better still.
And make no mistake, the Q50 fills its role in the system extremely well too. The shift from horizontal to vertical is as seamless and the movement between speakers and tonality is extremely consistent. What really helps the Q50 is that it feels like it has a scale and weight in its own right. KEF claims that it rolls off sharply from about 90Hz but while I wouldn’t use one as a subwoofer, it feels like it has more going on than that. This helps it deliver an energy and scale to the effects that gels well with the other speakers in the set.
In some ways, while these speakers are extremely good with some ballistic action going on, it’s what happens when you ask them to do something less frenetic that they truly start to excel. Watching Nightcrawler – for no other reason that I rather fancied watching it again – the way that the KEFs handle Lou Bloom’s entry into the house to shoot footage is absolutely exceptional. There’s very little in the way of effects as this happens but what there is in the mix is there to load tensions and the KEF handles this perfectly. With Sully, the courtroom scene is a masterpiece in muttered conversations, changing in tone as the evidence changes. There are plenty of speakers that live to deliver the heavyweight moments in cinema, it’s dealing with the little moments that frequently unsettle them though and here the Q Series is imperious.
The Kube 10b also turns in a solid performance. To be perfectly clear, where it my money, I’d still go for a BK Electronics P12-300SB for much the same amount of money but the performance of the KEF sub is good. It extends down below the Q750 (and by extension every other speaker in the set) and integrates well at the same time. Fast, sustained impacts can reveal a fractionally sluggish side but for the very reasonable asking price, this is a very capable and flexible sub that should work in a variety of locations.
These abilities are noteworthy for film but the KEFs are just as happy with broadcast material too. The Q650C might be a bit of a monster but it can handle muffled dialogue with absolute indifference. Having the KEFs available for the standard choices of broadcast TV has been very pleasant indeed because – as noted – when you aren’t looking for pin-you-to-the-wall dynamics (and when watching The Great British Bakeoff I confess I’m really not), they deliver a simple, honest and tonally brilliant take on events. If you need explosions, they’re ready and willing but more importantly they consistently get the details right.
Their stereo performance is also good. I found that best results are achieved running the Q750s on their own without the Kube10b helping as the Q750 is better controlled and more agile than the sub (and has more than enough low end to make music sound convincing in its own right). That same effortless three dimensionality and tonality that the Q350 has is present here too and the Q750 does a fine job of taking even dense and congested recordings and making them sound more open and spacious. A very quick test with them wired to the Naim Supernait 2 which oversaw the Q350 review suggests that the floorstander isn’t quite as rhythmically assured as the standmount but both are perfectly capable getting you engaged with the music.
