KEF's story began on October 2, 1961, when Raymond Cooke, a former BBC engineer and Technical Director at Wharfedale, founded KEF Electronics in Kent, England, working initially out of Nissen huts on the site of the former Kent Engineering & Foundry Company — the source of the company's name. Cooke's ambition was clear from day one: use the latest advances in materials technology to build loudspeakers that reproduced music with genuine, unforced naturalness.

That founding philosophy — captured in Cooke's own words, that KEF should return music to the listener "without drama, without exaggeration, without artifice" — drove decades of genuine engineering firsts. KEF became the first loudspeaker manufacturer in the world to use computers in speaker design and measurement, developed the classic BBC-commissioned LS3/5a in the 1970s, and introduced the coincident-source Uni-Q driver in 1988, a technology now in its 12th generation and still central to KEF's sound. Cooke received an OBE in 1979 in recognition of his contribution to British engineering.