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Graham LS8/1 Loudspeaker

Graham LS8/1

The appearance of Spendor BC1 speaker in 1968 marked the beginning of a new epoch in loudspeaker design. For the first time, a box speaker with dynamic drivers was able to compete in terms of low coloration with electrostatics, which had previously set standards that no box speaker could reach, in spite of the impressive accomplishments in the 1950s by Acoustic Research in particular. But the BC1, designed by Spencer Hughes, set a new standard of sonic accuracy for box speakers. Hughes was working with the BBC research program, and the BC1 utilized the BBC-developed idea of making a thin-walled plywood enclosure with damping applied internally to the panels. And crucially, it used a bass/mid driver developed by Hughes with a membrane made of a plastic known as Bextrene. Hughes founded Spendor (the name was a combination of his first name and that of his wife Dorothy) to produce the BC1, and Spendor also offered the design to the BBC, which eventually accepted it without significant change as its LS3/6 monitor design.

People were fascinated by the Spendor BC1. The accuracy with which it reproduced the sounds of musical instruments was uncanny, and this was widely recognized immediately. Early reviews in TAS expressed some reservations about limited dynamic capacity, but recognized the startling midrange truthfulness. And when I acquired my own pair in 1978, I was completely fascinated by the accuracy of reproduction of the human voice and of my own instrument, the violin. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the BC1s led to my whole involvement with audio from then on. I realized for the first time that audio could actually work. I was already familiar with the sound of electrostatics, KLH 9s and original Quads, but fascinating though these were, they had seemed to me to sound like sound from panels in a somewhat distracting way—wonderful but not utterly convincing as real sound. But the BC1s seemed to me a new world of musical realism.

This has continued for me ever since. And so it has been for a great many other people, as well, with the BC1s and their descendants, the Spendor SP1 and SP1/2, the latter designed by Spencer and Dorothy Hughes’ son, Derek Hughes.

More recently, Stirling Broadcast has offered the L3/6, and now Graham Audio the LS8/1—these two also designed by Derek Hughes, and both based on the BBC LS3/6, which, as noted, was itself a BBC version of the original Spendor BC1. The essential design concepts seem to have eternal validity: Both the Stirling Broadcast LS3/6 (which is BBC licensed) and the Graham Audio LS8 reviewed here are, in effect, lineal descendants of the BC1s, and very close they are. Not for nothing did the BBC license the Stirling Broadcast L3/6 as an LS3/6. 

There are substantial differences, however, between all these post-BC1 speakers: The bass/mid drivers have cones of polypropylene, not the BC1’s Bextrene. The newer speakers have also benefited from modern driver technology, in general, especially in being able to play louder. These are all Hughes family speakers in the best sense—evolution has happened over the years, but the fundamental design concepts have remained the same.

The history is very interesting, and a book would be well deserved and useful, I think. But fortunately a great deal of reliable information is available online, including the BBC’s own reports on its loudspeaker research. On a more personal note, Derek Hughes has been so kind as to contribute some recollections on his part in the tradition (see sidebar). History aside, though, the new Graham LS8/1 stands on its own in the contemporary world: It is an exceptionally good speaker by today’s standards, in a distinctive way that both honors its historical background and at the same time takes full advantage of the progress made in the 50 years (and a little) since the Spendor BC1.

The Basic Sound

Let us talk first about pianos. Of course, the piano is a very recognizable instrument, recognizable on a one-speaker table radio or even a telephone. But getting a piano to sound not just recognizable but actually right is difficult. The initial transient is crucial: A piano recording played backwards sounds like an accordion having a bad day. The initial transient, the attack, is also very abrupt, but somehow round, not “bang-y.” And the sustained sound after that is complex, with shifting balance among the harmonics and shifting timbre as the sound decays. Most speakers make rather a hash of all this. But the LS8/1 gets it right in a striking way. The attacks are clean and precise, and the fine structure of the sustained sound is there in all its complexity, but without the “bad string” impression that many speakers can generate, if they ring somewhere in the upper frequencies. I recall playing, by contrast, some big line-source speakers for my piano technician. She said they made the piano sound as if it had “bad strings”—bad strings ring oddly with peculiar harmonic content in the decaying sustained sound. There is none of that here in the LS8/1. The sound is very compact, free of spurious ringing. The fine structure of the actual ringing of the notes is all there, but nothing is added—no false resonances are happening.

I am mentioning this first because it is a crucial feature of a speaker that it is free of micro-resonances, of the colorations induced not by broad-band response variations but by narrow-band resonant behavior. The absence of such is very gratifying on all material, even if one is not acutely conscious of it as such. And pianos are especially revealing of this feature of speaker performance. Also, I just like piano music a lot—and it is a special pleasure to listen to it on the LS8/1s! Interestingly, while exceptionally good piano recordings sound especially good, indeed, ordinary, run-of-the-mill piano recordings also benefit. This absence of micro-resonances improves everything.

The BBC-based designs were carefully optimized to sound natural on the human voice, and the LS8/1 is outstanding here, too. Speech is unusually convincing. The narrations on test recordings that one has always just listened to get an idea of what the track is about suddenly sound like people speaking to you in an unwonted way. More importantly, spoken-word recordings with artistic intent sound unusually natural and convincing. (The BBC Sherlock Holmes Boscombe Valley Mystery is amazingly convincing).

Singing voices also sound superbly natural. To take some example outside my usual “classical music” realm, the solo singer in “I’m Ready” on Dave Wilson’s classic recording of retro-rock Cruising with the Desotos and the vocalist in Opus 3’s Blumlein-recorded “Tiden bar gaar” both sounded like real human voices, almost moving outside the realm of sounding like reproduced music, at all. Julie London’s voice—my favorite singer of the 1950s period—was even more deliciously natural than ever. If you like vocal music, the LS8/1 is the ticket.

Word intelligibility is also at the highest level and not purchased via high-frequency emphasis. So is resolution of individual voices in choral groups, on, say, the “Gaelic Blessing” on Reference Recordings’ masterful Rutter Requiem recording.

This kind of resolution of complex activity in general extends to non-vocal material, as well. When everyone is playing together on Water Lily’s A Meeting by the River, the separate identity of every strand remains clear. (This is another Blumlein recording where everything should stay all laid out in position and texture.) And complex orchestral music is similarly resolved. My perennial favorite on Telarc, the Ravel-Borodin-Bizet disc, in the Carmen Suite, in particular, the full orchestral passages are presented with great clarity, and the reverberation effects—off-stage versus on-stage trumpets, for instance—are completely convincing. 

I have been mentioning recordings that have been around for a while because these are things that I have listened to on many speakers, including on many of the BBC school, and they give a useful baseline for comparisons of the new LS8/1s. What emerges in these comparisons is that the LS8/1 occupies high position both for low coloration and for resolution, especially in the midrange and upper bass. A speaker of this type—where all the sound up to 3kHz is carried by a single driver—makes great demands on that driver and also on the behavior of the cabinet. The driver involved and the thin-walled-cabinet approach, familiar from BBC history, are doing a superb job. Indeed, one can begin to wonder if the exotic, heavy, and expensive cabinets that have become popular in recent years are really buying anything in listening terms. Designer Derek Hughes has called the damped, thin-wall cabinet an “engineering solution,” as opposed to the brute-force, heavy, ultra-rigid cabinet approach, which has the possibility of shoving resonances up into the frequency range of maximum human hearing sensitivity. And it is an engineering solution that works in audible terms. One can even develop a sneaking suspicion that those resonances forced up into higher ranges are actually attracting the unwary to the heavy, rigid-cabinet speakers. Heresy, perhaps, but still…one wonders.

The LS8/1 has greater bass extension and dynamic capacity along with tighter bass than the previous Hughes family descendants of the original Spendor BC1 design. But it is still not a totally extended bass powerhouse. In a really large room, one might add a subwoofer system to good effect (I recommend the Audio Kinesis Swarm, as usual, for smooth extension that differentiates against room modal bad effects). But for rooms of ordinary domestic size and for most music, the LS8/1 has satisfying bass on its own. (My understanding is that the better bass performance comes from a larger, stronger voice-coil assembly compared to the similar Stirling Broadcast LS3/6.)

Dynamics and Coherence

It may come as a surprise to those who hold the hoary old traditional view of British speakers in general, and those of BBC heritage in particular, as lacking punch and life that the LS8/1 is, in fact, dynamically lively, indeed. They have what Keith Johnson calls “jump factor” to a full extent. John Eargle’s recording for Delos of Shchedrin’s Carmen ballet (Bizet’s music re-orchestrated with lots of percussion) really startles. The big percussion hits like a hammer, and the smaller percussion instruments are full of snap and liveliness. It is a blast!

Actually, earlier Hughes family BC1-related speakers had this property, too, for those who listened with an open mind. I recall pianist/audio expert James Boyk commenting to me how remarkably well the Spendor SP1/2 handled the live mike feed of his powerful piano playing. He added that a great many speakers fell apart when asked to deal with such completely uncompressed material, while the SP1/2 sailed through without demur.

The LS8/1 does the same. Not only will the LS8/1 play loudly, it will track dynamics in listening terms impressively well. Again, piano music tells the story. Freddy Kempf’s Rachmaninoff recordings for BIS have their delicate moments, but there is also a lot of powerhouse playing in true Rachmaninoff style. Many speakers make one cringe a bit when these big power moments arise. The LS8 sails through with power but no bangy-ness or cringe-inducing compression effects. Very impressive from a relatively small speaker—or, indeed, from any speaker.

Part of this feeling of dynamic linearity in listening terms comes I think from the bulk of the music coming from a single driver with no crossover in the middle of its range. This also contributes to the naturalness of instrumental and vocal sound as a whole. It is a scientific fact (although not always recognized as such) that phase non-linearity in the region from 100Hz up to, say, 800Hz (or higher) is audible as shifts in timbre [cf, S. Lipshitz, M. Pocock, J. Vandekooy, JAES, 30, 2012]. Speakers with high-order crossovers in this midrange, broadly conceived, do not in fact sound quite right, no matter how flat their response might be. And there is no crossover like no crossover, although three-way speakers with a separate bass driver offer some advantages in principle in bass power and extension as compensation. The most troublesome range for these phase effects, in the lower midrange, is in the LS8/1 far from any crossover. (The crossover to the lower tweeter is all the way up at 3.5kHz.) What you are hearing is just an acoustic replica of what is coming in over most of the range of music’s fundamentals and lower harmonics. 

Once you become accustomed to this, multiple-driver speakers with crossovers of anything but first-order in the middle frequencies sound a little odd and unnatural by comparison. One comes really to appreciate the coherence coming from no crossover at all until quite high up. A true single-driver speaker is somewhat impractical on account of driver break-up effects and beaminess issues, but in the LS8/1 you get almost the full benefit of having one driver without any of the problems.

The Stereo Behavior

The LS8/1 is surely an excellent speaker as a mono source, but its special magic, its almost unique aspects, comes through when one listens to its stereo performance. It illustrates to an extreme why there is more to stereo than just pairing up two monos. Now, to appreciate the stereo possibilities of the LS8/1s a little care is needed. Sit exactly in the center, equidistant from the speakers. (This is a prerequisite for correct stereo from any pair of speakers, but especially effective here.) Aim the speakers straight at you, even to the point of aiming them precisely at your ears, left-to-left, right-to-right. You are looking for perfection here—care taken will bring large rewards. And forget about aiming the speakers along the room axis, not toed in at the listener. This never works right with any speakers because too much sound comes off the sidewalls, de-focusing the image, but again you will be better rewarded with the LS8/1s than with others, which won’t work right no matter what you do! And sit reasonably close. With these things done right, you will hear stereo as stereo ought to be, and a striking thing that is.

Focus is total. A mono signal played through both speakers sounds like a point source in the exact center. Reverse polarity of one channel and the sound becomes truly nowhere. “Ralph” on Stereophile’s Test CD1 barks from the exact center in total focus when in polarity and is absolutely nowhere when out of polarity. This effect always happens a little with any setup of any speakers, but here the difference is really compelling, positively startling.

How does this arise? It is related to the fact that the LS8/1 becomes quite directional at the top of the bass/mid driver’s operating range. This feature, which would be a disadvantage for off-axis listeners, is a real virtue in stereo, because it minimizes any sound off the sidewalls. It is a mantra in some quarters that wide and uniform “dispersion,” uniform over frequency, makes for better stereo imaging, but exactly the opposite is true. Sound from the sides, from reflections off the sidewalls, creates a (fake) sense of space but it de-focuses stereo and diminishes the real spatial information recorded. And in practice the LS8/1  has overwhelming and fascinating stereo focus. And the sense of immersion in somewhere else, in the recording venue’s original acoustic environment (with well-recorded material) is positively uncanny and musically extremely gratifying.

Many years ago, Bob Stuart of Meridian described the experience of listening to one of the earliest DSP “room-correction” systems, the Sigtech AEC1000, as disconcerting to him because the sense of being somewhere else was so extreme that when a non-recorded sound occurred in the listener room, one was brought abruptly back to the listening room in a way he found alarming—a sort of pulling out of the recorded acoustic back into the real world around you. To my mind, this was because the stereo was pushed by the Sigtech into working correctly, in the way stereo is supposed to work. With the LS8s, properly set up, you have this true stereo effect without DSP processing. This is one of the major goals of stereo reproduction, and here it is. For those who like stereo—apparently not everyone does, but if you do—the LS8/1 presents stereo in a way that is both correct and musically attractive, in a way vital to valid musical experience. Real music in real space, as TAS co-founder Harry Pearson called it. Here it is.

One can surely see how this quality arose, historically—the BBC speakers were designed by comparison with live sound in performance venues, recorded ideally. Part of arranging a match with live versus played back was getting timbre and texture correct—low coloration of the sound. But part of it was getting the sense of recorded acoustic correct. And so they did, and so the LS8/1 does.

The Tonal Character

The original Spendor BC1 was remarkable by the standards of the time (or even now) in its absence of resonant colorations (above the bass) and its overall flatness of response (troelsgravesen.dk/vintageBC1.htm if you want numbers). But the frequency extremes deviated a bit, with some elevation in the treble (I put a filter into my pair to remove this). In the later Spendor SP1 and especially the SP1/2, the upper frequencies were smoothed out—the SP1/2 is unusually smooth and flat even by today’s standards. But the rise in the lower frequencies became an ongoing pattern, also in other BBC school speakers. In the LS8/1, the bottom from around 400Hz on down is a few dB elevated. The LS5/9 (also from Graham) begins its bottom-end elevation about an octave lower.

This bottom end rise is in practice useful and justified. For one thing, it offers a little leeway for the tendency of floor interaction to create a hole between 100 and 200Hz—the usual floor dip, in Martin Colloms’ phrase. Speakers that anechoically go all the way down flat often end up sounding anemic in listening rooms. There is also the Fletcher-Munson consideration that, with domestic playback volumes tending to be lower than the levels at the location of the microphones (which are often very high), the equal-loudness curves leads to perceived lower-frequency deficiency in the sound. One reason why reproduced music sounds wrong compared to the live experience!

In a sense, the LS5/9 sounds more neutral in audio terms than the LS8/1 in this regard, the LS8/1 having a little extra energy in the 200 to 400Hz octave. But, in practice, I personally found this extra low-mid energy untroublesome and even attractive. Pulling it out with EQ did not seem an improvement in musical terms. For whatever it is worth, my understanding is that this particular point is awkward to control in passive analog speaker design. But it is easy enough to adjust at line level or digitally, if one is so inclined.

Further up, the LS8/1 is superbly smooth and flat overall, as speakers go but it has a sight recession around 800–1000Hz and a return above that around 2kHz. (The Stirling Broadcast LS 3/6, is flatter from 800–1000Hz but is down a bit above that.) The effect in the LS8/1 is that images are slightly pushed back compared to what would happen with absolutely flat response across the region. In the world of penalty-free EQ, you can experiment for yourself with this effect, one way or the other. The main point is, of course, that the LS8/1 is so free of narrow-band micro-resonances that such matter of smooth response are completely controllable—there are no narrow-band effects needing alteration, and only smooth balance questions might arise, and those very minor ones.

The LS8/1 is a “free-space” speaker, intended to be used far from sidewalls and/or with sidewalls damped. In particular, because of the widening of the pattern when the tweeter comes in above the beaming behavior of the bass/mid driver, it is desirable to minimize (first) sidewall reflections around 4kHz, either by damping the first reflection points or by placing a panel to redirect the reflection at that frequency range away from the listener, in a sort of do-it-yourself RFZ (reflection-free zone) setup. The damping is easy to do—the wavelength of sound at 4kHz is about 3.4 inches, so it is not hard to absorb this. This is, in fact, a much better approach than wave-guiding the tweeter—a popular sport nowadays, but one which results in a colored and somewhat lifeless sound to my ears. In any case, far from walls and damped walls is the ideal situation for the LS8/1. Again, some care here will reap ample rewards.

Another feature of the radiation pattern around 3kHz deserves a comment. The original BC1 had a definite on-axis dip at 3kHz. The LS8/1 does not, but in listening terms there is a loss of overall energy in the room because of the beaminess of the bass/mid driver. But it is important to understand that this is, in fact a good thing, at least in my view. Siegfried Linkwitz pointed out that when one records diffuse field—which always gets recorded to some extent—and then play it back in stereo, so that the sound is now frontal, the nature of the ears’ response results in a perceived peak at around 3kHz [theabsolutesound.com/articles/in-memoriam-siegfried-linkwitz-19352018.] (Frontal response is stronger there than diffuse field response.) So, a certain relaxation around 3kHz makes a speaker sound more like live sound than it would otherwise. Linkwitz himself put a deliberate dip via a notch filter in his speakers for this reason. The BBC seem to have come up with this empirically. In any case, it works: The energy loss around 3kHz actually makes the LS8/1 (and the others of this family) sound better. (There are more things in Heaven and Earth in the actual science of sound reproduction than are dreamed of in the oversimplified quasi-science often passed off as “science” nowadays.)

Quick Comparison with the Stirling Broadcast LS3/6

Comparisons to the early descendants of the original BC1 are perhaps not very useful, since these speakers are hard to find in good condition. (I have BC1s and Spendor SP1/2s on hand, but it is hard to be sure that their condition is really representative, though they still sound really good.) But the Stirling Broadcast LS3/6 is very much alive, being still available. So a few words about the comparisons LS8/1 to LS3/6 (both designed by Derek Hughes) might be of interest. In general terms, they are very similar and both very good. The similarity is hardly surprising since both are based on the original BBC LS3/6 design. But there are some differences. For a start, the LS8/1 has more robust bass. The LS3/6 for some reason drops down a little at 100Hz before its final roll off an octave or so lower. And it is slightly recessed from 1kHz on up compared to the flat response in the octave below that. The overall effect is that the LS8/1 sounds a bit midrange oriented. In both speakers, the treble is natural and unexaggerated, but there is a bit more of it in the LS8/1, in the high treble especially. (In the final production version, the LS8/1 will have a switch 0/+1/-1dB for the tweeter, not present in my early review sample.) The LS8/1 has stronger and more dynamically capable bass, and also more bass extension, and a slightly more forward sound at around 2kHz, but a little recession from 800–1000Hz. All of this is in the context of an overall neutral sound from both. Small differences, that are for many people not much of a source of concern overall, but then BBC-school people will want to know! If you are not going to use a subwoofer system, the LS8/1 would be the best choice, especially if you like to listen to music with serious bass content. If you are inclined to or at least willing to use a sub system, then the choice between the Graham LS8/1 and the Stirling Broadcast LS3/6 becomes a matter of musical judgment. Ultimately, at this final level of ultimate subtlety, you are choosing a musical instrument, and choice becomes personal.

The Final Word

The Graham LS8/1 combines a tried-and-true tradition of design principles developed and refined by comparison with actual music, the lifetime experience of a gifted and practiced designer, and the resources of modern driver technology into a distinctive package with a distinct sonic identity of its own. If you are willing and able to provide it with the right acoustic environment, and if you can and will use it as it should be used, it will provide a surprisingly convincing picture of live musical events, if they are well recorded, while being able to extract the best from the less well-recorded. It is not inexpensive and to some eyes—not mine!—may seem not to offer enough technological glitz to justify its price. But listening clarifies the situation: It will provide a deep and enduring level of sonic truth and musical satisfaction.

I am reminded of a passage in John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker. The author recounts a conversation with a maker he encounters after a day at a meeting of violin makers. The luthier says, “All we really do for a living is make boxes.” (Pause.) “The thing is, they are magical boxes.”

Specs & Pricing

Type: Three-driver, stand-mounted, bass-reflex box-speaker system
Driver complement: 200mm (SEAS) mid/bass, 25mm (SB) tweeter, 19mm (SEAS) tweeter
Crossover: 3.5kHz, 13kHz
Frequency response: 45Hz–20kHz, ±3dB
Nominal impedance: 8 ohms
Sensitivity: 87dB/2.83V/1m
Maximum output level: 100dB/pair/2m
Cabinet: Thin-wall birch plywood, damped
Dimensions: 11.8″ x 25″ x 11.8″
Weight: 37.5 lbs.
Price: $9700/pr. (stands included)

GRAHAM AUDIO
Ringsdale House
Ringsdale Road
Newton Abbott, Devon, TQ126PT U.K.
grahamaudio.co.uk

On a Higher Note (U.S. Distributor)
P.O. Box 698
San Juan Capistrano, CA 92693
(949) 544-1990

Tags: FLOORSTANDING LOUDSPEAKER

Robert E. Greene

By Robert E. Greene

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