And I have framed another advertisment from that era.
Does anyone remember what was it about?
George
Does anyone remember what was it about?
George
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have never owned a pair but have lived with quite a few pairs. A love/hate relationship.
The last time i heard a pair, their boxiness was parriculaily noticable. IMO you can do a lot better then LS3/5A.
They are of significant historical significance and it seems are still making people money.
dave
I liked your comment and I think that if you say that you can't explain the why it means that presumably no one knows the why and therefore we are in the field of hypotheses, I have just three ones.
The first is that the brain consciously knows that the event is recorded/played and does not trigger.
The second is that the recording/playback flow is missing "something" (which we currently ignore) of the real event that the brain recognizes or does not recognise, and therefore the "trick" [which is not a trick, but a great ability of the brain (you do the trick with mixing 😉)] it doesn't activate.
The third hypothesis is that brain and senses, being first for the preservation of life, somehow "feel" that the reproduced event is not the real event and therefore do not "waste" themselves.
In this last regard a true story comes to mind from the book King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz, which I report here from memory.
A raven habitually "frequented" Lorenz's house and when at the end of an evening Conrad's friends were preparing to say goodbye, the raven began to say goodnight to them by imitating their voice, and this was repeated every time.
One evening Lorenz, who considered the raven to be the most intelligent animal on this Earth (personally I believe that it competes on a par with Jack Russell Terriers), devised an experiment for which he was never able to explain.
One day Lorenz thought of deceiving the raven and asked the friends who had come to visit him to behave exactly as when they were preparing to say goodbye after a reunion (they took their things, put on their coats, etc.), but the raven didn't say goodbye to them.
And it never did during all subsequent experiments.
The raven only said goodbye to them when they actually had to leave.
I love how we are rambling on to the LS3/5A 😂 their history is very well documented, but I'll briefly add that they were originally developed for non critical monitoring for outside broadcast trucks and spread throughout the BBC. The "3" denotes they were not graded for transmission monitoring, you needed a “5“ for that... Like LS5/8 etc.
A Complex crossover tailored to each driver pair just about tamed the vagaries of the KEF drivers.
Things have moved on...thanks to the massive leaps in material and modelling science. I think the current KEFs are fantastic performers from "objective" hearted engineers who know exactly where to apply thier effort for meaningful "subjective" performance gain.
A Complex crossover tailored to each driver pair just about tamed the vagaries of the KEF drivers.
Things have moved on...thanks to the massive leaps in material and modelling science. I think the current KEFs are fantastic performers from "objective" hearted engineers who know exactly where to apply thier effort for meaningful "subjective" performance gain.
Perhaps so, but my LS3/5As were far better than the KEF LS50s I had,
and hold up well even next to my Quads.
I've always found KEF speakers to be "over-engineered" ( and not in a good way ).
and hold up well even next to my Quads.
I've always found KEF speakers to be "over-engineered" ( and not in a good way ).
Interesting perspective on recordings I heard on an interview today in the car. Krystian Zimerman was being interviewed and was asked about recordings and he simply said that recordings are not music. Music and it's passion lives in time. Makes you remember everything you are missing with a recording, however good decay tails are on your system...
(small print: this is the opinion of one man, albeit one of the greatest living pianists. Other opinions on recordings are available and this post is not trying to prove anything)
(small print: this is the opinion of one man, albeit one of the greatest living pianists. Other opinions on recordings are available and this post is not trying to prove anything)
Well, I do have one pair of the very first group of ten pairs (s/n 7/8 of a certain brand which I will not disclose here),
which was personally tested by the BBC to qualify the manufacturer to produce them.
They may be a bit better than the usual production. They are certainly the best pair of any brand that I have heard.
The stacked Quads, regardless of what has been said about them, are simply not as good as a single pair of Quads,
properly set up. This also includes the much hyped HQD system of yore.
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I had Quads, removed the awful metal grill as well as the Mylar covering and put them on Arcicci stands. I drove them with those big Dynakit mono blocks w/ upgraded power supply and aircraft quality output tubes. Also upgraded power cord for Quads. At that point in time I was using an air bearing everything Maplenoll Ariadne turntable with 50 lbs platter mounted on sub Hertz iso stand + 500 ft of air tubing. I also had Fulton Nuance floor standers that sounded great.
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I'm loving this! Things have moved on, hence the 3/5a is outdated. You mean like transistors rather than tubes for hifi amplification. You mean 50 year-old tubes over current production. You mean like CD's rather than LP's. And nuclear power is too cheap to meter, and our world is ensconsed in peace, brotherhood, and civility .
OK, I'll play.
The 3/5a was reissued several years ago by Falcon Acoustics, with several of the original designers involved in the "update." They used the latest materials when appropriate, and in particular "modern" capacitors specifically designed for high quality music reproduction, which were not available in the early 1970's. But the #1 design criteria was to preserve the virtues for which the speaker is famous: transparency, naturalness, prodigious pinpoint soundstage, admirable transient response, and most of all, the ability to convey that illusive "gut sense of live music." I believe the Falcon's were reviewed by Stereophile recently and they received an "A" rating with qualification for limited bass response.
Oh, for the former days!
I purchased my first pair of 3/5a's in 1978. I still have them today. I also have the Falcons. They are a little bit better than my
45 year-old Spendors: they play a little louder without stress, the 3K brightness bump in all previous versions is tamed, and they sound a bit cleaner and more precise. But nothing profound. I bought them mainly because I figured my Spendor's can't possibly last for 50 years. Can they?
At this point I thought to recount my hifi equipment journey, from Double Advents blasting out of my dorm room window to Magnaplanars in my 10 x 55 trailer to FMI "Baby J's" purchased one piece at a time cuz I couldn't afford all at once. But I believe the following true story is more on point and certainly more fun.
I run the Luxman MB 3045 monoblocks for amplification, and in 2001 I had problems with one of them. However, I had lost contact with the folks who sold them to me, and thus needed to find someone to work on them. I settled on a guy named Steve Huntley, who ran Great Northern Sound in St. Paul, Minnesota. After several phone conversations I was persuaded he could handle the repair, and so I made the trek to St. Paul. Of course Steve had a very fine hifi system: Avalon Acoustics speakers, Atma-Sphere tube monoblocks, Audio Research SP-10, a souped up Wadia CD player and a Linn Sondek phono unit. And it sounded very fine indeed. But I couldn't help thinking that mine sounded at least a bit better overall. I had gotten to know Steve quite well by then, and a so I wanted him to hear my hifi! Somehow I came up with the idea of a bet. So I bet him $50 that he would agree that my hifi, which cost 1/3 of his, would sound at least as good as his.
Well Steve made the trip to Central Illinois and we got right to it. I cued up "Songbird," by Emmylou Harris. And not 5 seconds passed before Steve literally gasped. After the song was nearly over, he got a big grin on his face, pulled out his wallet and handed me 50 bucks.
How could this be? Huntley's stereo was by all familiar metrics a first class audiophile system. The best answer I can come up with is that the 3/5a is better than you think. How else to explain its enduring popularity?
My apologies for the length of this. I love these speakers. Some of the more critical remarks made me wonder if the 3/5a was not as good as I thought. And I believe that kind of questioning is healthy. But I have $50 that says you will like mine at least as much as yours!
OK, I'll play.
The 3/5a was reissued several years ago by Falcon Acoustics, with several of the original designers involved in the "update." They used the latest materials when appropriate, and in particular "modern" capacitors specifically designed for high quality music reproduction, which were not available in the early 1970's. But the #1 design criteria was to preserve the virtues for which the speaker is famous: transparency, naturalness, prodigious pinpoint soundstage, admirable transient response, and most of all, the ability to convey that illusive "gut sense of live music." I believe the Falcon's were reviewed by Stereophile recently and they received an "A" rating with qualification for limited bass response.
Oh, for the former days!
I purchased my first pair of 3/5a's in 1978. I still have them today. I also have the Falcons. They are a little bit better than my
45 year-old Spendors: they play a little louder without stress, the 3K brightness bump in all previous versions is tamed, and they sound a bit cleaner and more precise. But nothing profound. I bought them mainly because I figured my Spendor's can't possibly last for 50 years. Can they?
At this point I thought to recount my hifi equipment journey, from Double Advents blasting out of my dorm room window to Magnaplanars in my 10 x 55 trailer to FMI "Baby J's" purchased one piece at a time cuz I couldn't afford all at once. But I believe the following true story is more on point and certainly more fun.
I run the Luxman MB 3045 monoblocks for amplification, and in 2001 I had problems with one of them. However, I had lost contact with the folks who sold them to me, and thus needed to find someone to work on them. I settled on a guy named Steve Huntley, who ran Great Northern Sound in St. Paul, Minnesota. After several phone conversations I was persuaded he could handle the repair, and so I made the trek to St. Paul. Of course Steve had a very fine hifi system: Avalon Acoustics speakers, Atma-Sphere tube monoblocks, Audio Research SP-10, a souped up Wadia CD player and a Linn Sondek phono unit. And it sounded very fine indeed. But I couldn't help thinking that mine sounded at least a bit better overall. I had gotten to know Steve quite well by then, and a so I wanted him to hear my hifi! Somehow I came up with the idea of a bet. So I bet him $50 that he would agree that my hifi, which cost 1/3 of his, would sound at least as good as his.
Well Steve made the trip to Central Illinois and we got right to it. I cued up "Songbird," by Emmylou Harris. And not 5 seconds passed before Steve literally gasped. After the song was nearly over, he got a big grin on his face, pulled out his wallet and handed me 50 bucks.
How could this be? Huntley's stereo was by all familiar metrics a first class audiophile system. The best answer I can come up with is that the 3/5a is better than you think. How else to explain its enduring popularity?
My apologies for the length of this. I love these speakers. Some of the more critical remarks made me wonder if the 3/5a was not as good as I thought. And I believe that kind of questioning is healthy. But I have $50 that says you will like mine at least as much as yours!
No.
Things like drivers. Really remakable strides have been made with things like, as mentioned earlier (maybe not in this thread) adhesives, manufacturing techniques have improved. The drivers in the LS3/5A have significant issues.
That does not mean someone cannot enjoy them, and really like them.
Re the Falcons, Jerry was one of those original guys. His reprodutions are pretty faithful of the originals warts & all. QC will be better. Certainly caps have become way better. But the BBC had to beat the things to death to get the response they targeted. 15Ω final product with 8Ω drivers? How much XO does that take?
The restored LS3/5A i did had Falcon XOs.
They were all contemperaneous for me. The Advents were considerably more coloured but played louder with bass and outsold LS3/5A probably 500 to 1. Magnepans really need a big room, down’t sell as many aof them.
LP12? I’ve owned at least a dozen of those.
dave
I agree. That stacking destroys one important point of the QUADs, the point source concept.
I never understood the why. Is it just a matter of +3dB SPL?
Jan
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