The Twelfth LS3/5a
It all started when I moved my playback system from my 11' by 16' living room to my 12' by 17' family room: The latter has proven the better-sounding setting, and it’s also sunnier and more accessible—and the floor is more level and stable. (The family room is a circa-2005 addition on a 1936 house.) And now that my speakers and my racks of gear have been removed from the living room, there’s room for bookcases, books, and people who aren’t me. On the down side, when my system was in my living room, guests in the dining room—the next room over—could enjoy music more easily than they can in my present arrangement. Then again, conversation has since taken the place of companionable silence, so I’m happy enough.
On a recent Sunday morning, while my wife was having tea in the now-livable living room, she asked if I would ever consider reintroducing some or another playback system to that space. I gazed at the corners of the room where once stood DeVore Orangutan O/93 speakers and, before them, my even larger Altec Flamencos, and made an idle observation: “Not much would fit there now, except maybe LS3/5a’s.”
And that was that: I spoke of the devil, and it wasn’t long until he appeared.
It came from the recording van
I tend not to think of the mid-1970s as an auspicious time for great-sounding gear, just as I don’t associate the era with the very best-sounding recordings (with exceptions, of course). But at least one nice thing came from that time: the BBC’s original design for a loudspeaker initially referred to as the LS3/5: a 12"-tall portable monitor intended for use inside panel trucks and vans during location recording sessions. The LS3/5 was designed around two drivers from KEF—their B110 Bextrene-cone midwoofer and T27 Mylar-dome tweeter—with a slightly complex, phase-correcting crossover network whose component parts had to be individually selected and, in some cases, tuned: As intended, the speaker was so ruthlessly revealing that the slightest deviations from spec became glaringly obvious. The LS3/5 not as a dispenser of crotch-tingling deep bass—although a canny response bump at 160Hz, which is two octaves above the fundamental of the lowest string of a double bass, gave the impression of greater low-frequency extension than was actually on tap.
