Listening to the LS3/5
Contents
The first thing you will notice is that the music sounds organic and full of detail. The bass feels surprisingly weighty, giving body to voices and instruments. Voices and instruments also get a sturdy position in the wide stereo image, which is not projected very deep or in layers.
The bass in Stevie Wonder’s “As” dances and has a round and roaring sound, as you would expect to hear in a gospel recording, this is aptly rendered. Amazing how much bass can be delivered by such a small and closed box. It is neither deep and powerful nor palpable like from a large floorstander, but the LS3/5 does have some meat on its bones.
Voices are nicely placed to the foreground without losing connection with the instruments. The amount of detail and nuance in voices is particularly striking. As a result, it sounds very human and lifelike.
Micro-dynamics are very good, something you expect from a speaker that can be used as a monitor. Everything is rendered effortlessly, as the Rain Tree Crow track shows. If an amplifier can deliver micro-dynamics, the LS3/5 will show.
Steely Dan’s “Two Against Nature” is proof that rhythmic precision and timing are more than just fine. As tight as these Grahams play, without losing the swing, is stunning. And this track is notoriously tricky to get right.
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%