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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 was intended as a tool with which to assess speech intelligibility, performance quality, and freedom from tonal coloration, not as an appliance for delivering pleasing sound in a domestic setting, and certainly 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.
Once the design was finalized, the BBC made 10 pairs of LS3/5’s in-house, then set about licensing outside firms—first Rogers Audio, then that firm’s eventual holding company, Swisstone, and eventually 10 others—to manufacture all subsequent batches. But in 1974, before outside production began in earnest, the BBC’s engineers discovered that KEF had altered, apparently without notice, the designs of the B110 and T27 drivers. That prompted three changes: a redesign of the speaker’s crossover, to compensate for the audible differences between the old and new drivers; the installation of a thick felt corral around the tweeter’s mounting plate, to keep that driver’s output from roaming into the enclosure’s front edge; and a new name: LS3/5a (footnote 1).
By 1987, the BBC’s engineers made another unhappy discovery: The consistency of KEF’s B110 drivers had been less than admirable. There ensued another change to the specs of that driver and, in a compensatory move, to the LS3/5a’s crossover, one side effect being a reduction in the speaker’s nominal impedance, from a tube-friendly 15 ohms to a tube-cordial 11 ohms—but this time, the model designation went unchanged. And in 2000, KEF threw in the towel and ceased altogether making the B110, prompting licensee Stirling Broadcast to commission bespoke drivers from SEAS and Scan-Speak, engineered by Derek Hughes, son of Spendor founders Spencer and Dorothy Hughes. The BBC smiled their approval; Stirling nevertheless launched their version of the classic portable monitor with a newer name: LS3/5a V2.
Graham Audio, of Newton Abbot, UK—a picturesque village not far from Torquay, which was the setting for Fawlty Towers—recently introduced their own LS3/5a ($2990/pair), making them the model’s 12th licensee. This version—for which Graham Audio has revived the brand name Chartwell, which they own—also uses a crossover and bespoke drivers that were engineered by Derek Hughes. Graham’s LS3/5a has the same specifications as the 1987–2000 version: a thin-walled (12mm) birch-ply cabinet with a fixed (rather than removable) rear panel and a single pair of input connectors; a nominal impedance of 11 ohms; a frequency response of 70Hz–20kHz, ±3dB; and a rated sensitivity of 83dB.
But this isn’t Graham Audio’s first crack at making and selling a BBC-designed minimonitor: A few years ago, they became the first-ever company to produce a commercial version of the original BBC minimonitor, which they sell as the Chartwell LS3/5 (also $2990/pair). That speaker was also engineered by the peripatetic Derek Hughes, under direction of Graham Audio’s Paul Graham, who told me via e-mail that he did so because “we thought it would be more interesting to go back and recreate the original [because] it was very well thought of, sonically, at the BBC.”
That being said, Graham acknowledged that the reason for his recently unveiled LS3/5a was, quite simply, demand: “A number of distributors, particularly in the far east, said their customers wanted the LS3/5a.”
A few details: Graham’s Chartwell LS3/5a has front baffles that are painted black, then fitted with the above-mentioned felt tweeter barrier, and with Velcro strips to hold in place the speakers’ black-fabric grilles; all other cabinet surfaces are finished in a choice of real-wood veneers. The rear panels are glued in place—ie, are nonremovable. The midwoofers have thick coatings of an unidentified dope, and their rubberlike surrounds are extremely pliable.
Graham’s Chartwell LS3/5 is a slightly different-looking thing. Here, the front baffle has neither felt nor Velcro—grilles are held in place by hidden magnets—and that baffle shares the same finish as the rest of the speaker (in this case, an extremely nice-looking rosewood veneer). Rear panels are screwed in place and are presumed to be removable. The midwoofers have thinner coatings on their Bextrene cones, their fabric dustcaps even less so. And their surrounds are slightly less pliant than those of the Graham LS3/5a’s. Their tweeter domes are made of Mylar, protected by nonremovable metal grilles.
In hushed tones
I had before me a multipronged dilemma:
I wanted to write about Graham Audio’s new LS3/5a, yet it seemed irresponsible to do so without anticipating the question that would surely be on some readers’ minds: How does it compare to the same company’s LS3/5?
Next came the no-less-reasonable question: How do both speakers compare with the Falcon LS3/5a ($2995/pair), which has been praised in recent volumes of Stereophile?
And finally, how could I write a meaningful review by driving three similar-yet-different speakers with an amplifier—my Shindo Haut-Brion—that would seldom if ever be part of such a pairing in the real world?
The first two problems were easily solved: I asked nicely, and Philip O’Hanlon and Pandora Pang of Graham Audio distributor On a Higher Note arranged the loan of both Graham–Chartwell models, as well as a pair of 24″-tall stands ($599/pair) commissioned specifically for the speakers by Washington retailer Gig Harbor Audio. Then I asked Jonathan Derda of Falcon Acoustics distributor MoFi Electronics for a loaner pair of their LS3/5a’s, and he kindly packed up and shipped me his own personal pair.
The amplification dilemma was slightly trickier, complicated by the fact that I cannot and will not review an unfamiliar loudspeaker with an amplifier that is similarly new to me: How could I know which product was responsible for which performance characteristics? (footnote 2) Then I remembered the integrated amplifier that so impressed me just three years ago, the classic Naim NAIT 2 as reconditioned by Chris West of AV Options. I spoke with that company’s Nick Despotopolous, and he arranged the loan of a NAIT 2 that had been rebuilt to their Ultimate level ($2294, plus the cost of the original amp), owned by customer Nile Garritson. (Thanks, Nile!) As a bonus, the NAIT 2 in question was one of the very few made with Naim’s original “chrome-bumper” casework: how cool is that?
I installed the amp on a 20″-tall, half-width Box Furniture rack that I borrowed ages ago from speaker manufacturer John DeVore, now installed near to my living room’s front wall. Along for the ride were the Naim ND5 XS 2 network player I reviewed in the April 2019 Stereophile and my Thorens TD 124 turntable, presently fitted with Sorane ZA-12 tonearm and EMT TSD 15 N SPH cartridge. All three speakers were placed on the Gig Harbor stands, each held in place with four wasabi-pea-sized balls of Blu-Tack. In each case, the speakers were 44″ from the front wall and either 31″ or 35″ from their respective side walls, all dimensions measured from the center of the baffle. All three speakers sounded their best when toed in to aim directly at a centrally placed listening seat.
Footnote 1: The LS3/5a has been written about often in our pages, the most recent full review being Herb’s take on Falcon Audio’s version. To add footnotes for every other LS3/5a piece that has appeared in Stereophile would likely fill a half a page; suffice it to say that our website’s search engine is your friend. Start with John Atkinson’s 2005 essay here. Note also that veteran writer Ken Kessler has contributed a number of insightful LS3/5a pieces to our sister publication, Hi-Fi News & Record Review, and these are not unworthy of the perusal of most listeners.
Footnote 2: This reluctance isn’t just me trying to look noble—it’s a long-standing Stereophile policy.