To Milan on Wednesday by invitation of UK audio manufacturer KEF for the unveiling of their amazing and brave Muon speaker, designed by Ross Lovegrove.

The day started with the usual sightings of most of the UK design intelligentsia on the flight to Milan. It was good to see Will Knight from the London Design festival, Grant Gibson, ex editor of Blueprint and spied Dyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, amongst others.

Well done KEF for making such a splash. This was a real Milan launch, with the unusual combination of Italian design journalists and photographers mixed with UK audio editors and KEF's finest, who certainly had not experienced anything like this before.

The setting was the gorgeous Sala delle Colonne, originally a monastic library and now part of the National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo de Vinci. There wasn't much to see of the museum but a green laser guided us through covered corridors to the library, which decorated on every surface with glorious frescoes.

The room was certainly not chosen for it's sonic qualities but as a setting for such a heroic venture, and of course the legendary Ross Lovegrove, it was perfect. Having told everyone to wear black, Ross came in gorgeous blue, and barefoot, to add to his mystic image with his shock of white hair and beard. He was the Master and this was his moment, conversing brilliantly with impossibly beautiful Italian journalists, male and female. A pulpit projecting high on one wall seemed empty without him and we heard he had been using it for press photographs earlier in the day, and why not.

 The speakers themselves are huge, reminding me of ancient stones, Easter Island heads or icons from 2001. The design from the front is a little disappointing, dominated by the five speaker cones set in the aluminum which doesn't sparkle as much as the press photographs. I've heard that many designers are using photoshop to embellish the images of their designs, but I don't feel comfortable about that. Surely the finish, patina and texture is all part of it?

But the side and rear views are great and very Ross with the swooping surfaces and tense forms. I liked it, and having designed big speakers myself, was glad to see someone battle with all the problems of speaker design and come up with something interesting. This is, after all, a very conservative industry which usually chooses to ignore visual or any other design consideration apart from the audio. But companies like B&W have made a great (and largely uncelebrated in the UK) success with years of great designs from Morton Warren and companies like KEF and Tannoy are now catching up. Hi-fi and home cinema has to sit in your living space after all and be looked at by your partner. And more and more of customers are female, demanding better design quality in both product design and user interface.

So well done KEF for deciding to do such an adventurous thing, and I hope it's a huge success and they can follow it up with great design across their entire range. Read my Design Week review on my web site http://www.clivegrinyer.com/articles.html