Falcon Acoustics BBC LS3/5a

The cult surrounding the LS3/5a—the “little legend,” as it’s sometimes called—is among the longest lived components in all audio and in many respects one of the strangest. The British Broadcasting Corporation designed the speaker in the mid-Seventies to answer a need for a diminutive monitor for vans, control rooms, and other small spaces that couldn’t accommodate full-range monitors and where headphones wouldn’t do. Thus was born what became the first subcompact monitor. (It is always risky to pronounce something the “first”; suffice to say it was the LS3/5a that put the genre on the map.) A two-way with a drive complement consisting of KEF’s 0.75″ T27 tweeter and 4.5″ B110 bass/midrange, it had cabinet dimensions hardly anyone could take seriously: 7.5″ x 12″ x 6.25″. Nowadays when speakers this small can cost tens of thousands of dollars, that would hardly raise an eyebrow, but back then attention was paid. Against all odds and to the surprise of no one more than the designers themselves, the speaker caught the attention of a few audio reviewers, most famously perhaps J. Gordon Holt, whose original rave in Stereophile introduced the speaker to American audiophiles. A cult—indeed, an icon—was born.

The LS3/5a had a remarkable run of more than two decades before KEF stopped producing the drivers in the early aughts, effectively putting an end to new product. Such was the demand of its enthusiasts, however, that manufacturers searched far and wide, grabbing up remaining supplies of drivers. LS3/5a’s of various provenance continued to be produced for a few years, though in ever dwindling numbers. Soon enough, supplies of new drivers and other components dried up for good. Then in 2008, Stirling Broadcast, a British manufacturer specializing in new versions of classic BBC speakers, commissioned Derek Hughes—son of the near-legendary Spencer Hughes (the BBC designer who founded Spendor) and a very gifted designer in his own right—to engineer a speaker that would mimic the sound of the original LS3/5a, including its tonal balance, bass limitations, and colorations. Despite having to use SEAS and Scan-Speak drivers, Hughes realized the brief so brilliantly that Stirling, already an LS3/5a licensee, was permitted to use the nomenclature (though with a V2 added to indicate that it was not literally the original). Stirling’s was not the first “imitation” LS3/5a, but it remains the only one to have any sort of legitimacy. (I wonder what was going through Hughes’ mind while engaged on this decidedly quixotic project. Surely he must have been amused to be required in effect to dumb down the substantially superior speaker he could have made had he been given free rein to call upon his own knowledge and experience.)

 I reviewed the Stirling version in TAS 166. Although over a decade and a half had passed since I last owned LS3/5a’s, I was long familiar with their sound because I used them daily for several years in my cutting rooms as a monitor. Right off, what I heard certainly tallied with my recollections. Here is my description of the LS3/5a sound from that very favorable review: “First and foremost is a midrange of quite extraordinary richness and presence, with an almost palpable thereness, particularly on voices and acoustic instruments. Second is its sheer openness. At the time of its introduction in 1975, only speakers without enclosures (Quads, KLH Nines, Magneplanars) exhibited greater freedom from boxiness. Third is superb imaging and soundstaging. And fourth, rarely remarked upon but noticeable: a subjectively ‘bigger’ presentation than that of most mini-monitors or, to put it another way, less of the miniaturization effect. Soloists, instrumentalists, jazz trios, string quartets, and so forth are projected with a realism that is still rather startling.”

Preparing for the arrival of the Falcons, I re-read that Stirling review—shaking my head, I must confess, with each passing paragraph. I seem to recall that at the time I decided to put and keep myself in a nostalgic frame of mind so as to suggest something of the enthusiasm and even sense of wonder that greeted the original, and why it has enjoyed such high esteem and affection far longer than it had any right to on the basis of its intrinsic performance. So I did what most audio critics who write about the LS3/5a do: state or, to be frank, overstate its virtues and minimize, if hardly mention its deficiencies, which are more numerous and serious. Best to fill in some background.

I bought a pair of LS3/5a’s in 1978 or ’79, mostly encouraged by Holt’s review, and enjoyed them for several years, though rarely as my primary speakers except for short periods when I was between primary speakers (which is rare, as I purchase my speakers very carefully and tend to keep them for a long time—I’m over twenty years with Quad’s ESL-63/988/2805 series and I still own and enjoy fully restored 57s). During all that time, I was never unaware of the LS3/5a’s shortcomings, but its strengths—mostly its midrange, its openness (especially in those still-box-ridden days), and the sheer amazement factor of its Lilliputian size—tended to overcome my objections; overcome, but never entirely silence.

The truth is that from its inception the LS3/5a was always a problematic speaker. The BBC never conceived it as a Grade I monitor—it was always and only ever Grade II, that is, suitable for monitoring programs but not for engineering them. The reasons are several. Its diminutive size doesn’t allow for much dynamic range and its bass response is at best mediocre and at worst nonexistent. Despite the storied strictness of the BBC’s specs and standards, the worst-kept secret in the world is that many LS3/5a’s did not meet spec or maintain their performance over time. (Alan Shaw of Harbeth discovered original BBC frequency-response graphs taken from many LS3/5a’s that show decisively how variable the performance of the speaker really was, especially in the presence region. This video is accessible through the Harbeth users group website.) There were so many issues with respect to parts, materials, and construction that from one point of view the history of the design could be seen as a succession of Band-Aids applied to solutions insufficiently thought through, anticipated, or addressed in the first place.

Complicating all this further was the matter of implementing the design and manufacturing it. Because KEF made the drivers and handled many other aspects of the physical realization, the LS3/5a was in effect a joint effort by the BBC and KEF. Yet KEF, the practical partner, had the very devil of a time dealing with the BBC, the theoretical partner. In what must be the funniest understatement in the history of the speaker, one of the KEF people remarked, “The LS3/5a suffered a bit from the ‘not invented here’ syndrome” (quoted in Ken Kessler’s KEF: 50 Years of Innovation of Sound, which tells the story of the development of the speaker from KEF’s point of view in great and sometimes risible detail). By 1979, KEF had become so frustrated with the BBC that it introduced its own subcompact, the KEF Reference Monitor 101, which remained in production for seven years. Though it never had the benefit of cult support, KEF regarded it as more accurate over its usable range and far more reliable.

For its side, the BBC focused primarily on research as opposed to product development and left manufacturing to commercial companies under license (curiously, KEF not among them). What with the BBC’s vagaries about several aspects of the design, including the crossover and the cabinet, and the inconsistencies of the B110, it was inevitable that there were subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences from one licensee’s LS3/5a to another’s. Gather a bunch of LS3/5a enthusiasts together and you’ll soon find yourself in the middle of a lively argument as to whose is the best sounding: Rogers, Chartwell, Audiomaster, Spendor, RAM, Goodmans, Harbeth, and, more recently, Stirling Broadcast and now Falcon. Back in the late Seventies, the two licensees available in America were the Rogers and the Chartwell, and the arguments as to which was better could get quite—well, let’s say spirited. (Mine were from Rogers.)

Thirteen years after the LS3/5a was first licensed, its problems of uniformity, consistency, and reliability had so worsened that in 1988 the BBC undertook a major overhaul. Among other things, special attention was paid to the obstreperous B110 midrange/woofer and the crossover. At one point, the BBC evidently considered whether it wouldn’t be wiser just to redesign the whole thing from scratch, but this was nixed because there were so many LS3/5a’s in the field that a decision was made to stay with an obviously colored, flawed, not quite stable design, albeit one with characteristics the engineers already knew how to adjust for, than to go with something new and more accurate. (See sidebar.)

One result of this redesign was the reduction of the nominal impedance from 15 ohms to 11, which if nothing else, made it easier to distinguish LS3/5a’s on either side of the divide. What happened next was predictable: For true believers, the 11-ohm version could and would never be allowed to sound as good as the 15-ohm, and in turn none of the 15-ohm versions could ever sound as good as the original pair (numbered BBC No. 1 and BBC No. 2), which have acquired almost Arc-of-the-Covenant status among the faithful. Yet in 2001, when Ken Kessler, as righteous a keeper of the flame as anyone, arranged a listening comparison of LS3/5a’s drawn from every conceivable vintage and manufacturer, and the one that emerged victorious was from Harbeth, both a late licensee and an 11-ohmer.

Knowing what an exacting designer Harbeth’s Alan Shaw is—he worked at the BBC before he purchased Harbeth from Dudley Harwood—I wasn’t surprised because the best LS3/5a ever made is the Harbeth HLP-3, originally introduced in 1991 and now in its third and best iteration, the P3ESR (see my 2009 review in TAS of its immediate predecessor, the P3ES2). This is because, dissatisfied with the deficiencies of the LS3/5a, even those from his own company, Shaw did what the BBC should have done back in the late Eighties: return to first principles, use what was valuable in the original design and research, then do the job right and make a speaker that is vastly more uniform, reliable, and accurate, as well as able to maintain its performance without material degradation over the long run. The HLP-3 so glaringly exposed the flaws and shortcomings of the LS3/5a that I immediately sold mine and bought Harbeths for my cutting rooms. Perhaps needless to say, they were much more satisfying for listening to music as well.

Myth and Reality
The biggest myth about the LS3/5a is that except for the missing deep bass and the nearly missing midbass, the speaker is otherwise very accurate. This is demonstrably untrue. Forget about listening evaluations for a moment and just look at any competently taken set of measurements and you will see that, however pleasing its sound may be as sound, it is quite incapable of reproducing an accurate acoustical analog to the electrical signal it’s presented with. Let’s start at the bottom, anyhow. All who write about the speaker, myself included, resort to a shameless number of euphemistic qualifiers to describe the bass: “surprisingly good,” “unexpectedly deep,” “lower than you might think,” etc. In other words, as with Dr. Johnson’s famous dancing dog, it’s not that the dance is good, it’s that a dog is doing it. The speaker has zero response in the bottom octave, severely compromised response in the 40–80Hz range, and at best problematic response in the 80–120Hz range. This owes in part to what is often affectionately referred to as the “hump,” a substantial rise in the vicinity of 125Hz to give the impression there’s more bass than there is. This is partially successful for casual listening and/or listening at lowish levels, but any really critical listening reveals bass that is rather glutinous, sluggish, and lacking in real definition, especially as regards pitch. Put on timpani and drum in thickly scored passages—Act IV of my trusty Bernstein Carmen on DG—and it’s not unusual to find that it’s difficult to distinguish both pitch and strength of attack. And because the hump is a hump—as opposed, say, to a broad rise with a smooth roll-off—it not only can’t be ameliorated with careful tone-control correction, but any such attempt often makes things worse because the small woofer, already stressed, is strained even further, so in sonic terms the bass unravels even more, becoming loose and wooly. The hump also makes the addition of a subwoofer difficult: Bring it in too low, and you still have a lot of missing midbass; bring it in higher, and it makes the hump even worse (a rising tide raises all humps!).

The lower midrange is plainly the glory of the speaker: It really is rich, seductive, and yes even a little “magical.” But this comes at a price. The response actually begins to slope after the hump as it enters the midrange proper (i.e., 300–500Hz) before it begins a gradual rise to 1000Hz, where there is a large peak that actually winds up being nearly an octave in length. Put on Sinatra and you hear the effects of this immediately: The lower range of his voice is accentuated. In other words, there’s a little too much baritone in his baritone. Meanwhile, though that peak at 1kHz helps project the sound out of the box, it also makes him sound more nasal than he does. (With female singers, the voices are generally too light.) From 1kHz to around 12kHz the response is most charitably described as a series of peaks and troughs of varying amplitude that is anything but flat, which makes this part of the range sound unrefined and even a little coarse. As the overall trend is rising, the presentation becomes bright. The response drops as it goes out to 20kHz.

How could the BBC, of all institutions, countenance such a speaker for two decades? Well, one answer that immediately presents itself is that the speaker was never intended for very critical listening. The monitoring uses to which it was put on the job were more than likely pretty basic, such as making sure a broadcast was sounding at all, that it wasn’t distorted or interfered with by extraneous noises, etc. Then, too, the LS3/5a has always struck me as being designed more for voice than for music as such, more for checking the quality of the broadcaster. (As a film editor, I deal mostly with production dialogue, which is one reason the LS3/5a worked so well in my cutting rooms.) To be sure, the bass limitations and the deviations from flat are not so gross that the speaker can’t be used to check if the overall tonal balance on music or other programs is in the ballpark, but we do well remember that despite the seemingly endless fixes the LS3/5a required over the decades, it was never, ever elevated to Grade I status.

Despite all these problems, the LS3/5a, when not pushed too hard, can still be a captivating speaker, notably on voice and undemanding acoustic instruments—even also an impressive one, especially in view of its history. But “history” is the operative word here: The LS3/5a was in its own way and for its time a groundbreaking, even innovative design worthy of most of the attention, respect, and affection it has received. But recognition of its historical importance should not deafen us to its considerable limitations, weaknesses, and, there’s no sense using lesser words, flaws and defects. (I think it important here to point out that there were several other small speakers that followed—Braun, ADS, Celestion, the aforementioned KEF 101, to name just four that come to mind—that qualified people considered competitive and arguably more accurate, but such was the hegemony of the LS3/5a and its cult that they go unacknowledged, if they’re even remembered. As I recall, a small Braun model with subwoofer occupied a place on Harry Pearson’s recommended list for a while.) Yet not long ago I read a review of the Falcon LS3/5a that asserts, “The LS3/5a excels at letting you hear exactly what your amp really sounds like.” This is crazy. Not only does the LS3/5a not excel at any such thing, but owing to its frequency response anomalies, its inadequacies as a bass reproducer, its limted power handling, and its at best adequate dynamic range, it is literally incapable of any such thing. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that if you find an amplifier that results in an impression of tonal neutrality driving an LS3/5a, then buy it, because you’ve lucked into one of those audio synergies where complementary defects yield a desirable outcome. (This last comment is for effect only—in fact, it’s unlikely any amplifiers out there, even the most weirdly colored SETs, deviate so far from flat as to be able to make this speaker sound neutral.)

Falcon Acoustics
If a wholly new LS3/5a built to original specifications with vintage parts and materials was to be manufactured and marketed, the task could not have fallen to a company with more legitimate claims to experience, authenticity, and even authority than Falcon Acoustics. Founded in 1972 by Malcolm Jones, a former engineer at KEF and substantially responsible for designing and developing several classic KEF drivers, including the B110 and T27, Falcon, though a small company, has long been one of the leading British suppliers to the retail DIY market of components and other items necessary for building speaker systems. Before long, the company was distributing drivers by other manufacturers and offering do-it-yourselfer kits of complete loudspeakers (“everything but the wood”). In 1982, Falcon applied for a license to build LS3/5a’s, but the BBC gave it instead to Goodmans, for whom Falcon, by then with a firmly established reputation for high-precision work, wound up supplying crossovers. For much of its history, including up to the present day, Falcon has maintained a large catalog of parts and components for LS3/5a’s.

According to Jerry Bloomfield, who purchased Falcon when Jones retired in 2009, the company was “repeatedly approached to start making a B110 and T27 with original materials and correct specifications again so that people could keep their KEF-based systems working.” Once committed, Bloomfield and Jones went to great lengths to get the original materials, including commissioning a ton of the original Bextrene polymer required for the B110. (The history of the B110 as regards performance, materials, specifications, manufacturing techniques, and the like is so complicated as to resist summary. Bloomfield and Jones both grant that virtually no vintage LS3/5a’s have met spec for a long time now and that one of the several culprits was the B110. But Falcon for its part seems to have done everything imaginable to ensure that current B110s are at once truly vintage, yet of a unit-to-unit consistency, sustainable over time, traits that eluded those of two and more decades ago.) After some two years of producing and selling the newly minted woofers and tweeters, he said, “We thought it might be fun to make a ‘classic’ Falcon LS3/5a using the original drivers.” Once again customers were instrumental in motivating them, not to mention very articulate in defining what they wanted. “We were being asked for the real thing,” Bloomfield said, not a simulacrum using other drivers voiced to imitate the original.

This proved a more daunting proposition than it was possible for Falcon to anticipate. It is by several orders of magnitude more difficult to resurrect an old design in all its original integrity as regards parts, materials, construction, and manufacturing processes than it is to build a new one from a clean slate. There can be no gainsaying the love, dedication, and sheer effort—say nothing of expense—that Bloomfield and Jones invested in the project once they committed to it. For example, like the original Bextrene, certain adhesives that have long since vanished from the scene Falcon had to have reformulated. They also decided that, as before, the speakers had to be manufactured and assembled wholly in the United Kingdom, which involved considerable effort finding people who still possessed the requisite skill sets. According to Bloomfield, the B110 alone “took two years of patient preparation work finding materials and getting parts made before we even built the first prototype.”

Falcon’s LS3/5a was unveiled in 2014. Here is the product description from the company’s website: “Falcon Acoustics BBC LS3/5a [is] built to the demanding BBC Specification and with full BBC License. The Falcon BBC LS3/5a is the classic 15-ohm version, featuring the British-made Falcon B110 and the Falcon T27 drive units. The hand-built British crossover is the BBC-designed FL6/23 transformer design, using transformer inductors made by British manufacturers and close tolerance pair matched components throughout. Cabinets are made from selected grade Baltic Birch Ply with beech battens. Veneered in selected wood veneers, Cherry, Walnut, Elm, Yew (Special Edition), and Rosewood. The Falcon BBC LS3/5a is hand-assembled and final pair matched in Oxford, England.”

This will doubtless be the sweetest music to every LS3/5a lover’s ears. Far from idle boasting, the description appears to be the literal truth, and therein consists a decidedly alloyed achievement. I wish I could end the review right now by reporting that Falcon’s is every inch the original, but I can’t. For one thing, even if I had the technical expertise, I lack any means of verifying the claim. Indeed, if Bloomfield is right in his assertion that Malcolm Jones, who was “there at the beginning,” “is possibly the last one alive who was personally involved” in the original conception, design, and implementation of the LS3/5a, then it follows that Jones himself may also be the last man on the planet who is in any position to know for certain. In pointing this out, my intention is to question neither the honesty nor the veracity of the claims. On the contrary, I am completely convinced that Jones and Bloomfield have done everything humanly and technologically possible to make theirs a one-hundred-percent, dyed-in-the-wool, pure-quill original LS3/5a.

Once this is granted, however, what about the sound—is the LS3/5a back in all its fabled sonic glory? Who can say for sure? For reasons I hope I’ve made adequately clear, no version of the speaker throughout its long history has sounded quite like any other version, despite the BBC’s insistence that any unit from any provenance can replace any other unit from any other provenance regardless of year of manufacture. This being the case, about all I can report with reasonable confidence is that Falcon’s is recognizably a member of the LS3/5a family: no deep bass, limited midbass, a fullish sounding upper bass long on warmth but somewhat short on definition, clarity, and drive; a rich lower midrange luscious as ever; a midrange that is down in level with respect to the lower midrange, but that rises toward 1000Hz, then peaks above that to provide a sense of projection and freedom from boxiness but also somewhat nasal (more about this in a moment); a trend toward brightness and considerable raggedness from 1kHz to 12kHz, whereafter it slopes. In all respects, then, classic LS3/5a sound, allowing for the inevitable variations.

There are two effects that struck me as more pronounced than in previous iterations. First, an increased edge and nasality in the presence region. I checked my notes for the Stirling review and came across no mention of this there, and I certainly can’t remember it from the several years I used my Rogers versions in my cutting rooms. Historically, the LS3/5a has always been variable in this part of the frequency range (see the already cited BBC graphs that Alan Shaw discovered), only here it sounds to me somewhere more in evidence. I noticed that in at least one published set of measurements, there is quite a mountain around this frequency, about 5dB at its peak, which makes it as high as the 125Hz hump. This would account for the edginess—though perhaps a better description might be shoutiness in the presence region—and for the greater nasality. It would also account for why the midrange proper sounds slightly recessed, as the ear apparently keys onto the rises at 125Hz and 1000Hz.

Second, I took the speakers over to my colleague Robert E. Greene’s, where we listened to the Dallas/Litton recording of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances using the Magtech amplifier. Though the level was not loud—it seems to me we could easily converse without much raising our voices—a bass drum transient made one of the woofers emit a sound that resembled a single sharp knock. Both REG and I assumed this was woofer bottoming, but Jones says that the construction of the B110 is such that bottoming is impossible. Whatever it was, it occurred just this once, very late in the review period—there was no other indication of misbehavior before or afterward. Since I was unable to duplicate this effect at my place, despite a pretty liberal hand on the volume control (though none of the amps I use at home—see below—generate as much sheer power as the Magtech), I’m tempted to call this one of those anomalies in audio for which there is no readily available explanation.

According to my memory of the Stirling Broadcast LS3/5a and my notes, the Falcons do sound a bit less transparent, which doesn’t surprise me. However good the original KEF drivers were in their day, they have obviously been superseded by a generation or two of much better drivers, especially in the areas of transparency, linearity, and resolution (which suggests to me that KEF had good reasons for retiring them). I do not remember the sound of my Rogers LS3/5a’s of decades past to be able to say with any certainty whether the Falcons are more or less transparent than they were.

The results I’ve reported here were obtained with several amplifiers, including Son of Ampzilla II, Quad 909, Magtech, and the latest version of McIntosh’s classic MC275 (review forthcoming). There were the usual subtle differences among the amplifiers, but nothing that was revelatory or transformative. Many staunch 3/5a enthusiasts insist that only with tube amplification does the speaker sound its best. The MC275 is of course one of the great classics among vintage tube gear, renowned for its neutrality and low distortion, and it even has 16-ohm speaker outputs, a theoretically ideal match for the Falcon’s 15-ohms. I settled on the McIntosh for most of the listening since it is in keeping with the retro aspect of the whole endeavor.

Though I realize that Falcon’s purpose with this speaker is to revive, rather than improve the original, I still find it hard to assess its position as a product in the current marketplace. Its appeals to nostalgia and tradition are obvious and understandable enough. As the old peasant in The Wild Bunch says, “We all long to be a child again,” or at least to reclaim our lost youth. This being impossible, the next best thing is sometimes to surround ourselves with the objects of our youthful enthusiasms and passions, whether classic automobiles, grandfather clocks, or vintage audio gear. This granted, is it fair to evaluate the speaker in terms of present-day standards?

I believe it is. For one thing, the LS3/5a was for the better part of a quarter-century widely regarded as the best minimonitor in the world, the one against which all others must be measured, and the cachet of its BBC provenance is prominently featured in all the promotional literature. For another, a recurring refrain among fans of this speaker, whether audiophiles or reviewers, is how well it has stood the test of time, especially by comparison to others of its genre. For a third, there is no indication in the marketing of this speaker, its sales, or its reception that it is intended only as an exercise in nostalgia. And, finally, the reviews I’ve seen by the most intemperate LS3/5a enthusiasts gloss over its limitations and betray no suggestion, let alone awareness that there are many other speakers of similar size that may transcend those limitations.

At $2200 a pair, both this new Falcon and the Stirling Broadcast LS3/5a’s cost about the same as Harbeth’s P3ESR ($2300/pair), yet in my view the Harbeth is demonstrably more accurate, with greater bass extension and dynamic range, flatter frequency response, and superior resolution. I can’t pronounce it the most accurate subcompact monitor ever made because I haven’t heard them all, but it’s unquestionably the most accurate I’ve ever heard, save only for the new Sony SS-NA5ES, which costs $6000 a pair (reviewed in the previous issue by REG). The P3ESR still has the hump at around 125Hz, but because it’s better engineered, thus much better behaved, the bass, though still down in amplitude, is cleaner, better defined, and more articulate and it responds more favorably to judicious tonal boost to provide more legitimate warmth and foundation (it’s also more amenable to subwoofers). The overall midrange gives up some of the lower midrange richness in favor of being very flat and thus more truthful from the bottom of the midrange through the lower highs, except for a pretty mild (and far from gross) rise around 1kHz necessary to give the reproduction some projection (despite having less projection as such than the LS3/5a, the P3ESR actually sounds more open). The highs are very smooth, extended yet unaggressive, and, as is not the case with the LS3/5a, rather better integrated with the response from below. The overall flatness makes for a minimonitor of excellent refinement and resolution yet with considerably wider dynamic range and higher transparency, easily up to the standards we expect from quality contemporary loudspeakers. It’s little wonder that one reviewer, a longtime card-carrying member of the LS3/5a club, pronounced the P3ESR “the best iteration yet from any manufacturer of the BBC LS3/5a minimonitor concept.”

But a minimonitor is still a minimonitor, even Harbeth’s, with the all the attendant limitations of the breed. Setting aside nostalgia, the hang-up some audiophiles seem to have with very small speakers, and the weakness many seem to have for the charms of the LS3/5a, I can’t for the life of me understand why anybody would pay the prices asked for products this dated or this limited when it comes to assembling a home sound-system for the primary purpose of playing music in what Leonard Bernstein has called its “infinite variety.” Page through our most recent Editors’ Choice Awards (Issue 261) and you’ll find any number of speakers by the likes of MartinLogan, PSB, Paradigm, KEF, B&W, Revel, and Magnepan that boast much wider frequency response and dynamic range, and distortion, transparency, and neutrality that either beat or are competitive with many expensive minis. You may protest that some of these speakers are larger than minis and others are floorstanders. True enough, but a few are also not larger, most are considerably less expensive, and whether subcompact or compact, their footprints are effectively about the same as for a floorstander, given that stand-mounting away from walls is required for optimal performance.

In the end, for all the appeal of the LS3/5a, its brethren, and its descendants, size really does matter, as does technology. I still require bass response and dynamic range adequate to a piano, a jazz ensemble with string bass and drum set, chamber music so that cellos may sound forth with proper warmth and body, my occasional wanderings into rock ’n’ roll with some kick and force, to say nothing of the symphony orchestra as it evolved from the eighteenth century into the peerlessly glorious instrument of late nineteenth and early twentieth.

This review has been in many respects fraught with frustration. Bloomfield and Jones have lavished fanatical care, commitment, dedication, expense, and nearly Herculean effort making an original LS3/5a in all its past glory. To a remarkable degree, they appear to have succeeded, even though their success consists in a beautifully realized reincarnation of a design that is manifestly limited, flawed, and certainly dated. Yet it also possesses a personality that has survived into in what, this year, marks the dawn of its fifth decade, its spell over older listeners unbroken even as it attracts new ones. So if it’s an LS3/5a that you want, then inasmuch as there are virtually no vintage pairs from any period in the design’s history that meet specification and perform as they’re supposed to, Falcon’s is likely to offer a closer approach to the original sound than anything else out there. However quixotic the quest, Bloomfield and Jones have seen it through with love and honored its heritage. For many that will be enough. Live and be well.

SPECS & PRICING

Type: Two-way, sealed-enclosure mini-monitor
Driver complement: 0.75″ dome tweeter, 5″ midrange/woofer
Frequency response: 70Hz–20kHz
Sensitivity: 83dB/2.83V/1m
Nominal impedance: 15 ohms
Dimensions: 7.4″ x 11.9″ x 6.4″
Weight: 11.8 lbs.
Price: $2195/pair

BIG EAR CONSULTING (U.S. Distributor)
(800) 752-4018
ls35adirect.com
falconacoustics.co.uk