Intro
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The Graham Audio LS3/5 is a small form factor design from the 1970s utilising thin walls. Will this design still deliver, 50 years later in the high-resolution streaming era, or is this a nostalgic ‘trip down memory lane’?
Broadcaster BBC designed a small monitor speaker for use in their mobile television trucks in the early 1970s. These were given the type designation LS3/5. The design was licensed to various audio manufacturers from 1975 on and was popular until the early 1990s.
The LS3/5A is the version that was sold in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. The 3/5, without A, is the original version that was never in use by the BBC. During the design phase, the selected KEF speaker unit was modified by the manufacturer. This resulted in a modification to the design, marked with an extra ‘A’. For those interested in audio history this Wikipedia page tells you all.
Graham Audio is the only manufacturer making a 3/5 version derived from the original design, next to the well-known 3/5A version. Both versions are compared in this review.
Are they different? Yes indeed, but the family resemblance is stronger than the differences.
OK, although this is an older review, I would like to point out one thing, I think very important, which nobody is addressing. Apparently deliberately. It’s about measuring speaker distortion.
Why do we have at home amplifiers with 0.1 or 0.01 distortions and further electronic devices with similar parameters, when our speakers can have distortions even above 10%.
That’s probably why nobody measure speakers, because the manufacturers would be obviously very angry to the editor or the journalist…
Surely there is some norm for measuring loudspeaker distortion, almost certainly the DIN standard knows such measurements, but maybe there are also other norms.
Wouldn’t it be worth to show the truth to the readers?
I have found so far distortion measurement of the loudspeakers I own. It’s the DALI Menuet SE and here are the values : 63 Hz – 3,2%, 3 KHZ – 0,2% and 10 KHz – 0,2%