Playing classical music with Graham Audio LS3/5 speakers
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Playing classical music over the LS3/5 speakers is a delight. There is so much texture and information in the sound of instruments that following the melodic lines in the music is easy. In “Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tellis” by the Academy of St Martins in the Fields, the strings continue to sound homogeneous and sonorous, giving the music the ebb and flow the piece should have.
Young Matthias Goerne can be heard with all the subtle vocal inflections and the piano is positioned correctly underneath. Vocals are so palpable on these speakers, in this their monitor origins become readily audible. The distinctive difference between the 3/5 and the 3/5A is also immediately apparent with this track. The 3/5 brings more detail to the vocals, the piano sounds richer, the music breathes more in space. But the emotion in the lyrics and music hits you unfiltered with the 3/5A.
The Concertgebouw hall doesn’t fit in the small box
Large symphony orchestras are more challenging. From the deepest harp note to the softest bassoon notes, you will hear everything, but the speakers cannot project the scale of an orchestra. I do not think anyone expects this from such small speakers. The surprise will be the other way around: these speakers reproduce the orchestral music with ease, make all the instruments audible individually and do not get saturated with the most complex and furious passages.
The LS3/5 gives orchestral music more room to breathe than the 3/5A, here the preference is clear. This is mainly due to the bass runs deeper, having more presence and texture in for instance the double basses. But for all other music in the classical genre, the choice is not quite so distinct to make. It is a matter of preference and speaker-amplifier collaboration.
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%