Q50a Dolby Atmos-Enabled Surround Speaker

Q50a is expertly tuned by KEF acoustic engineers to bring extraordinarily immersive, cinematically vertical Dolby Atmos sound into the home using precision ceiling reflection when placed on top of Q Series speakers. It is also easily mounted on the wall using dedicated keyholes, creating a high-fidelity home surround sound experience that melds seamlessly with the newest Q Series speakers. Its Damped tweeter loading tube produces a detailed and natural high frequency sound. Part of the Q Series family, Q50a’s visual design shares elements with other Q Series speakers, allowing it to blend seamlessly into contemporary interior design.

What is Dolby Atmos?

In real life, sound comes from all around. But conventional surround systems only allocate it horizontally – left, right, ahead and behind. What makes Dolby Atmos so staggeringly realistic is that the movement of every sound in the scene is reproduced in all three dimensions, including vertically. This creates a true 3D acoustic image of precisely located individual sounds that move in relation to you as if you were actually there. The effect is uncanny. Exhilarating. Sometimes scary, sometimes hilarious; always engrossing.

How does it work?

Dolby Atmos is infinitely more flexible and adaptable than channel-based home theatre. When a Dolby Atmos stream is fed to a Dolby Atmos compatible A/V receiver, the receiver will render the object-based audio to your home theatre’s unique speaker configuration to precisely recreate the sound the filmmakers intended. Dolby Atmos has the ability to adapt to diverse speaker setup. You can enjoy the full effect with just seven KEF speakers.

What do I need?

With an A/V receiver or pre-processor that supports Dolby Atmos decoding and playback in your system, you can play Dolby Atmos content at home through any Blu-ray disc player or game console, or via your favourite streaming service (with the device set to bitstream output and secondary audio disabled). Then it’s a just question of choosing your extra speakers – and for home theatre audiophiles, that means KEF.

KEF gives you two ways of reproducing Dolby Atmos soundtracks – either by installing Ci Series flush-mount speakers in the ceiling, or simpler still, adding the sensational new KEF Q50a up-firing Dolby Atmos-enabled speaker module to your front and rear satellites. Either way, it’ll transform your enjoyment of film.

Q50a Dolby Atmos-enabled speakers

KEF’S new Q50a Dolby Atmos-enabled speakers sit above your existing floorstanding or bookshelf home theatre speakers. Knowing how the brain perceives sound, KEF engineers have perfected a way of beaming the sound upwards so that it’s reflected by the ceiling to replicate the vertical dimension in Dolby Atmos recordings. Integrating perfectly with Q Series range aesthetically as well as sonically, the closed-box design of the Q50a is built around the Uni-Q array developed for the revolutionary KEF Blade. With a sophisticated 25mm (1-in.) tweeter at the centre of a 130mm (5.25-in.) bass/mid driver and KEF’s ‘tangerine’ waveguide to maximise dispersion, it has excellent dynamics with accurate, fast and clean midrange response. And as the speaker footprint is the same, no more space is required.