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Living Sounds Audio LSA-10 Statement Loudspeaker

Living Sounds Audio LSA-10 Statement Loudspeaker

LSA, or Living Sounds Audio, has been making loudspeakers since 2007, but recently the firm went through a major change. It was purchased by Underwood Hi-Fi, and its entire line of loudspeakers was redesigned. The first  new offerings are the LSA-10 monitor and the LSA-20 floorstander. Each comes in two versions, Signature and the more upscale Statement. We will review the stand-mounted LSA-10 Statement version, priced at $3495 per pair.

From the front the LSA-10 Statement looks like just another mid-sized two-way mini-monitor in a shiny, curved cabinet. But if you look at the back of the LSA-10, you’ll find that practically its entire surface is a passive radiator. That’s not something I’ve seen on other two-ways.

In the words of its co-designer, Dan Wiggins, “We wanted to make a monitor that played like a tower…something small that was truly full-range. Clean, wide extension, big dynamics, and able to do this with as little sound of strain as possible.” Now the primary question is how well did he and co-designer Dusty Vawter succeed?

Tech Tour
It’s not common for two independent designers to collaborate on a loudspeaker. According to Dusty Vawter, “After meeting with Walter, Dan and I discussed the design goals and the best way to achieve them, and then went to work. We started with cabinet design, and then Dan developed all the required drivers. Crossovers were created using my custom emulator system. This allows me to design many circuits with slight variations for comparison. For voicing, I listened to reference tracks, while Dan sat at the computer making on-the-fly tweaks based on my listening impressions. We then built physical models to confirm their performance and make the final selection of passive components.”

What they ended up with was the LSA-10, which is a two-way design with a large passive radiator. Although not high enough in sensitivity (at 83dB) for flea-watt tube power amplifiers, the LSA-10 has a slightly higher than “standard” impedance of 10 ohms. The crossover is not your cookbook second-order roll-off. Instead there’s an eighth-order filter that is purported to have “proper phase.” As a guy who has lived with loudspeakers with extreme crossovers, from Dunlavy’s first-order “natural roll-off” to Joseph Audio’s “Infinite Slope” (as well as Audience’s crossoverless designs), I have an open mind when it comes to whether a particular crossover outperforms others. Some will look better or worse in a particular test, but at the end, if a crossover is done well it will not be the weakest link in the loudspeaker. Other factors, such as physical size, driver characteristics, and power-handling capabilities generally overshadow crossover shortcomings.

The drivers for the LSA-10 comprise a custom 6.5″ aluminum XBL2 mid/bass and a 1″ copper beryllium dome tweeter. These two drivers are joined by a 5″ by 7″ passive radiator. The cabinet’s curved sides, which I mentioned earlier, have a sonic purpose (reducing in-cabinet resonances) in addition to giving the LSA-10 a less boxy and more stylish external profile.

Setup
I used the LSA-10 in two different setups. In both cases, careful placement was critical for the most linear harmonic balance. Unlike the vast majority of two-way bookshelf-sized loudspeakers, the LSA-10 has nearly as much bass extension and power-handling capability as a floor-standing design, so it will, in many rooms, require some additional space to breathe. This is not the sort of speaker that you will be putting close to room boundaries to enhance bass response. In some rare cases the LSA-10 may even be too much of a good thing for small underdamped rooms, which may have worked fine with less dynamic and bass-extended designs.

My nearfield system is set up in front of a large casement window, so instead of a wall that reinforces the bass response I have a space that allows some bass to escape. With most nearfield monitors I use this doesn’t seem to make much difference, since many have a bass response that rolls off before any serious bass enhancement could begin, but that was not the case with the LSA-10. Even without room-enhanced midbass the LSA-10 had more upper-bass to midbass presence than any monitor-sized loudspeaker I’ve installed on my desktop. I could have had even more midbass if I hadn’t placed the LSA-10 on IsoAcoustics speaker stands that raised them up so they were approximately nine inches above my thickly carpeted desktop surface. The stands located the drivers so that my ears were level with the top of the mid/bass unit and just below the bottom of the tweeter.

 

In my room-based system I found I needed to place the LSA-10 almost a foot further away from the wall behind them than is usual for a two-way stand-mounted monitor loudspeaker. Even though almost the entire wall behind the loudspeakers, floor to ceiling, is arrayed with 12″- and 16″-diameter ASC Full Round Tube Traps, a couple of inches one way or another made a noticeable difference in the system’s overall harmonic balance. I would not call the LSA-10s difficult to set up, but they do require (and deserve) the time to get their placement right if you want to hear their optimum performance capabilities.

If you’re a fan of that “dynamic” studio monitor sound, where the kick drums can really kick and vocals have that certain riveting presence, which is a guilty pleasure often associated with the JBL and Altec monitor sound, you may hear a certain sonic similarity in dynamic punch and the ability to rock like a much larger loudspeaker when listening to the LSA-10. Your setup and room need to respect the LSA-10’s ability to sound noticeably bigger that its britches, so to speak—and if you’re on a tighter budget, the LSA-10 Signature loudspeakers for $1000 less could be a cost-effective option. (I’ve heard the Signatures, and if they are as well broken-in as the Statements—the Signature loudspeakers needed quite a bit more break-in time in my system—you will be hard-pressed to hear any significant differences between the two, unless you do a matched-level A/B.)

I used two power amplifiers with the LSA-10s—the Pass Labs X150.8 in my room-based system and the Benchmark AHB2 power amplifier in the desktop setup. Neither had any issues driving the LSA-10 loudspeakers to well above what I consider normal listening levels. Front-end components included the Mytek Manhattan II DAC/Pre controlled by Roon via its Ethernet input in my room-based system. Other front-end sources in the room-based system included a Mac Mini connected to the Mytek Manhattan via USB, and my turntables—a VPI TNT III with Graham 1.5 ’arm and Clearaudio Victory II cartridge, and a VPI HW19 with an original Souther ’arm and Denon 103 cartridge. In the desktop setup I used three DACs—the Grace balanced DAC, the iFi Zen DAC, and the iFi S2 PreBox connected via their analog outputs to the Tortuga Audio V25 preamplifier with the latest upgrades. The room-based system has a pair of JL Audio Fathom f112 subwoofers, while the desktop system uses a single Velodyne DD10+ sub. In both systems the speaker cable employed was the latest Audience Au24SX, and interconnect was Wireworld Eclipse 7 for the long preamp-to-amp runs and Audience Au24SX for the shorter desktop analog cables. The LSA-10 comes with protective metal grilles that attach via magnets. Most of my listening was with the grilles removed.

Sound
Generating lots of clean, extended bass from a small cabinet has been one of the alchemical goals of speaker designers since the first transducer squawked to life. And while the LSA-10 loudspeaker doesn’t break the laws of physics, for those audiophiles who absolutely require that push on their solar plexus delivered by a 50Hz kick drum (but perhaps not the 16Hz notes from the Franck organ concerto), the LSA-10 sans subwoofer may be perfect…a good example of the former would be the drum on The Band of Heathens’ The Double Down: Live in Denver Vol 1. The punch on every bass drum hit was palpable through the LSA-10 in my nearfield setup.

The LSA-10 can throw up a big, bodacious soundstage if the music calls for it, such as in Grimes’ “Laughing and Not Being Normal,” where each orchestral section has a distinct spot across the large soundstage. When Grimes’ vocals come in, 48 seconds into the track, they occupied a sliver of space, dead center. The LSA-10 was also effortless on all the low-frequency drum hits, rumblings, and burblings, but I expected that.

Harmonic balance through the LSA-10s was not a happy-face affair (i.e. uptilted in the bass and treble), but a nicely balanced compromise, basically flat, but with a bit more upper-bass energy than ruler-flat. For me, the beauty of the LSA-10 presentation is how dynamically unfettered the upper bass and midbass were without polluting or obscuring lower midrange decipherability or dynamics.

As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, the current top end for my hearing is 13kHz, so I can’t wax poetic about the LSA-10’s air or extreme high frequencies, but I can hear that below 13k the upper frequency response is quite smooth with no annoying peaks or apparent jagged edges. Even on more aggressive music where the LSA-10 needs to sound rude, it does so without becoming nasty.

Like many smaller-footprint loudspeakers, the LSA-10s image with precision. On my desktop they can produce a large dimensional image with fine specificity and dimensionality. Because of their size, compared to that of most of the monitors I use regularly in my desktop system, the LSA-10s did not disappear quite as convincingly as the Audience 1+1s, for example. But unless you compare them directly to a much smaller-footprint loudspeaker the LSA-10’s physical presence shouldn’t be an issue, and in a room-based system the LSA-10’s ability to disappear rivaled the Spatial X-2 loudspeakers that I reviewed in Issue 302.

 

Summary
According to co-designers Dusty Vawter and Dan Wiggins, “the LSA-10 Statement was just a turn-it-up-to-12 design effort…How could we make a $10k reference monitor that could sell for under $4k? When you get completely free rein in all aspects of the technical side of a speaker—there’s a lot you can accomplish.” 

The LSA-10 Statement is a real-world example of such an effort, and from my reviewer’s seat Vawter and Wiggins have succeeded in producing an extremely dynamic and revealing monitor loudspeaker with surprising bass extension and dynamic control.

Got a medium-sized room that doesn’t have the space for a big loudspeaker or a smaller transducer with a subwoofer? Long for a dynamic sound with the ability to render a kick drum hit to your solar plexus while still retaining detail and delicacy in the midrange and upper frequencies? If your answer is “yes” to the previous questions, you should give the LSA-10 Statements a listen. They are, to my ears, reference-quality monitors at a reasonable price. 

Specs & Pricing

Drivers: Custom 6.5″ aluminum XBL2 woofer; custom 1″ copper-beryllium dome tweeter w/compact neodymium XBL2 magnet structure in shallow waveguide; 5″ x 7″ sub-bass radiator
Frequency response: 32Hz–30Khz +/-3dB
Sensitivity: 83dB in room
Impedance: 10 ohms 
Crossover: 8th-order computer designed with proper phase
Power handling: 20–200 watts
Dimensions: 8.0″ x 13.5″ x 14.25″
Weight: 27 pounds each
Price: $3495/pr.

LIVING SOUNDS AUDIO
Underwood Hi-Fi
(770) 667-5633
underwoodhifi.com 

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