Tony Crake

If you like loudspeakers, see  http://www.ls35a.com/ – the Unofficial LS3/5A Support Site.

Paul, the chap who looks after the web site, is a lecturer at Farnham for TV Media etc.  His Father used to work for Equipment Dept

Dave Plowman

Anyone else still got the Chartwell LS3/5a kits you could buy via the BBC in the 1970s? Mine are in daily use in the bedroom, and still sound good.

Dave Mundy

I own four of them, one pair bought from Chartwell under the ‘damaged cabinet’ scheme and a second pair bought as two pen-tested front baffles c/w LS units and Xover, plus two empty cabinets to match bought at a later date!

One day I hope to hear them all with my Quad 44, FM4, and 405 Mk.2 system (presently all boxed up in the loft!).

While I was still at TVC I had arranged with Chartwell to collect orders from people working in TVC. I got lots of orders but then the whole scheme was halted by a Mr. Snook, from Designs Department, because someone in Radio Brighton was getting them, with staff discount, and selling them at a profit! 

Dave Plowman

Mine were complete kits with perfect cabinets. Spendor used to sell their speakers at discount to BBC staff with so called damaged cabinets – but this was just a ruse to keep their dealers happy.

Other rumour I heard was that some were using the BBC anechoic room to set up the 3/5a kits – which displeased management. Wear and tear on an anechoic room being a major worry…  BBC jobsworths never cease to surprise me.

The story I heard was that Chartwell expected a large order for the 3/5a from the BBC which fell through. So they were left with stocks of the bits  needed to build them, and would have to pay a licence fees if sold to the public.

Genuine original LS 3/5a (Rodgers, etc) seem to have a fantastic BIN on Ebay. Round about £1000.

Rob Miles

Correct. I’ve just sold a pair, (Rogers), I bought for my parents 30 odd years ago, on Ebay for £1400! Madness.

Dave Plowman

Excellent – did they go abroad?

Bernie Newnham

Bids from all points East but won by a guy in Israel.

Dave Plowman

Falcon Acoustics have had all the bits remade – including the drivers – under the careful eye of one of the original KEF engineers. So you can still get them – although not with the ‘right’ badge.

Pat Heigham

Amazing price!

I sold a pair of Quad Electrostatics, which I was always a bit disappointed with, and a pair of Tannoy Chatsworths to an outfit near Bristol, who unscrewed the backs of the Tannoys to check that the dual cone drivers were genuine. I gather that the onward market was the Middle East.

I think I was happy with the deal at the time!

Now using a pair of Dutch BNS speakers acquired from Nick Ware, who swears that they are/were the best cone L/S to render a 30′ organ pipe sensibly. Still very happy with them (the top is useful to display my Awards!).

Nick Ware

Glad to hear you still like the BNS480 speakers. They were pretty exceptional at the time (around 34 years ago I think). Only three pairs came to this country as far as I know, Brian Roberts being the owner of the others. Not sure if he still has them.

Frits Bahn, who more-or-less hand made them, knew what he was doing, and although he owned a factory that made all of the Braun speaker range for many years, he never mass produced the BNS480.

The one I really wanted was the next step up, that he called the Translator (nearest Dutch, er, translation). Mine had to go to make floor space for a pipe organ! Actually I’m surprised some of the foam parts and natural rubber cone surrounds etc are still intact. But enjoy while you can.

I put together a kit-pair of LS3/5a speakers for Gorden McGill, a stores technician at Farnham Media Studies course. I wonder if that’s how that LS3/5a fan club started. Never really cared for them myself in a domestic environment. I thought the Goodmans Double Maxim knocked spots off them. All down to personal taste, of course.

The original version of the Quad Electrostics really needed a sub bass unit to go with them. John Hartshorn was the expert on that subject – a man with truly golden ears. RIP.

Dave Plowman

Yes. I do miss John. And his ELS setup with that bass unit in the fireplace was the best I’ve ever heard. Although the ELS is very room dependant.

Incidentally, a separate single sub works very well with the LS3/5a too, where space is limited. I think Rodgers produced just that setup.

Nick Ware

… I remember John quite often.

On my first Gram Op stint on “EastEnders”, I must have been pacing the Control Room, as he eventually said, "For goodness sake, just HAVE a cigarette!"

RIP John.

John Howell

John invited me round to his house in Harrow with one of my KEF ‘Monitors’:  these are 4cuft cabinets with an 18" X 14" bass speaker. We replaced the tweeter and midrange units with resistors and took a mono feed from his pre-amp via a 50Hz low pass filter into my Radford (valve) amplifier to feed the KEF. You are right Nick, the sound was transformed, we really rattled the glasses in the drinks cabinet!

Dave Mundy

John, I always remember visiting your flat after work at TVC and being inspired by your KEFs. ‘Abbey Road’ and Demis Roussos come to mind! Plus, poor old long-suffering Bob McFarlane, your flat mate, who had to put up with all the mad sound guys!

I have still got my Twin-Twenty stereo amps and control units thanks to your PCB designs, plus a Collaro tape deck, from a vision operator, which I never did convert to variable speed spooling as from your design in Hi-Fi News!

I did get a stereo Miniflux head and added it to my Phillips tape deck with a pair of home-made stereo pre-amps which worked well into my Stern-Clyne Mullard 5-10’s. Happy days! Now it’s all done for you, but is it any better?

Tony Grant

I’ve just sold a pair, (Rogers), I bought for my parents 30 odd years ago, on Ebay for £1400!

Good heavens, I had no idea these things were worth real money!

I have a pair of Rogers that I bought with the Beeb discount when I was in LG, and relatively flush. At the time, we were able to take a pair home from stores to try in the comfort and safety of our own home. Well, I was completely smitten once I’d heard them chez nous, and forked about £300 for a brand new matched pair which I picked up from Rogers (somewhere in S. London I think). They’re still happily speaking away in the lounge, and our granddaughter keeps getting behind them and unscrewing the wires, bless her, she isn’t even two yet (next month). She then complains about the lack of music (she loves bopping).

Now, much as I’d like £1000, I do not go near Ebay, since I used to successfully sell stuff there until they insisted I open a PayPal account, which subsequently went from bad to worse. So, I’ll just have to let her have her way around the back of them, and pass them down to her as a family heirloom. But to my ears, they sure still sound every bit as good as when I bought them. What’d you say?…..shure?…..no that’s mics……surely?…….no, don’t call me Shirley…….oh, what sure’s?……..ah, now you’re talking, I’ll have pint or three of Guinness.

Ed: this section continues: see Guinness

Tony Crake

We had LS/35A Loudspeakers in the CMCCR van on OBs …

It had been decided to increase the length of the vehicle to accommodate a much larger sound desk. The Sound Mixing fraternity seemed to not have liked the LS/35A set up and wanted bigger!   I decided to remove the 35As and see what might be fitted instead. A bit of a struggle – rather monster extra PID battleship clamps had been involved in the original fixing… went for lunch and possibly a few beers…….. but…

I had left the speakers on the floor…. when I came back… GONE !   I enquired of STR had they been down and perhaps locked them up for safe keeping… er.. NO!

Unused equipment used to just disappear! I wonder where they are now?

Dave Mundy

In 1963 when I transferred to TVC from Birmingham Radio, I was put onto Crew One with Dave Hawthorn, Dave Ball and three other sound guys.

The three Daves all came from Nottingham and Dave Ball and I became great friends, going to the Audio Fairs in the Russell Hotel every year until he left and went to Rolls-Royce in their noise measuring labs in Derby.

When I went home to visit family etc. we used to visit Dave in his own-designed bungalow in Gedling. One end of the large lounge had ceiling to floor net curtains behind which was an amazing collection of loudspeakers. There were Lowther Acoustas, GEC Metal Cones, home made IMF transmission line speakers (Dave, having visited John Wright who designed them, got special quality units for them) fed at first by a hand-made Williamson amplifier with special output transformers flat to 128Kc/s and later by Radford 22 system, Garrard 301, SME 12", Shure V15 cartridge.

At Rolls-Royce they used specially tweaked Nagras which were flat to 30 Kc/s. plus B&K noise measuring microphones. Dave borrowed the whole kit one weekend and recorded the ‘Flying Scotsman’ arriving and departing Grantham station! When played back in his lounge I swear you could smell the smoke and with the bass vibration you were there. Fantastic!

Terry Meadowcroft

I like the sound of the LS/3/5a; always have. In my brief spell between proper jobs (BBC to YTV) I worked in the Leeds University TV service as ‘head of sound’. (It was not a good experience).

I installed LS3/5As in all the doctors’ surgeries where a system was set up for students to listen in to the surgery conversations from an adjoining room. The speakers previously installed gave huge howlround problems because of their lack of linearity. Rather expensive in terms of the chewing gum and string outfit which the university television service was, but the students could make sense of nearly every word uttered in the surgery.

But of course the lack of extended bass meant that had to be augmented in a domestic Hi-Fi. A very good (down to 40Hz) Klipschorn was the right channel bass and I built a folded transmission line driven by two ATC 15" units under the bottom 7 stairs of the adjoining staircase to the left, speaking through the wall, down pretty flat to 30Hz in room after eq.  My ears tell me mono is not good enough for low bass.

Three Quad Esl 57s were left, centre and right front, suspended from the ceiling. I had been a Quad ESL fan ever since hearing them at the 1964 Audio Fair in  the Russell Hotel. It took me 40 years to decide that, although the treble is very, very quick, there was something ‘not quite right’ about the electrostatics, which was uncorrectable, and I finally ended up with 4 x Jim Rodgers JR149s extensively modded with new drivers which could handle the watts, and  carefully rebuilt crossovers, adjusted out in the garden (I live quite remotely!) using a Sennheiser MKH406, at some distance from the ground.

Those speakers sound good, and the back row consists of JR149s, unmodified. They have fuses!

John Howell

Quite exotic set-ups! I’m going to stick my head above the parapet and ask a couple of questions.

First: What is meant by the statement "the treble is very, very quick"?
Second: What do you mean by "My ears tell me mono is not good enough for low bass".

I ask out of genuine ignorance.

Terry Meadowcroft

Yes I suppose that was put in a way worthy of a HI-fi magazine; sorry!

What I was alluding to is that very short transients, such a are produced by cymbals, or breaking milk bottles on a concrete step, are reproduced by the Quads with great realism; not shrill, just realistic. The whole of the diaphragm is firmly held, all over, by the electrostatic field, so that the transients don’t have to travel in the diaphragm driven only from the edge of the voice coil, and they excite resonances in the diaphragm in such a way that the sound of the reproduced transient is altered by the construction of the diaphragm. Yes, because of the lightness of the very light diaphragm and the fact it is driven all over its surface, not from one point, with little ‘hangover’, it just sounds ‘fast’. Realistic.

What attracted me to the Quads when I first heard them, way back in 1964 in the Ferrograph demo room – it dragged me into the room at the Audio Fair – was a lovely recording of a jazz band, recorded for the show at 15"per second, and the realism of the cymbal transients struck me as terrifically believable, as never before. I was 19 then so I could hear the HF sounds that I can only remember now, sadly.

Mono bass. I have been for many years excited by low bass sounds. This fascination has given me to analyse the sound I am hearing and the effect it has on me. Bass from the orchestral bass drum excites the air in the concert hall in a certain way which I really like – it sort of ‘breathes’ through the room.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to hear ‘Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion’ – a great band – in York. What a truly wonderful sound. Whatever you may or may not think about Ginger Baker, he is (or was) a wonderful drummer.

What fascinated me was the sound of the bass drum. The way that drum produces sound is from both surfaces of the drum – figure-of-eight. It was clear that the result of the integration by the room of the front and back of the drum diaphragm was really interesting. In most bands the drum is miked up close to one surface of the drum only, with little of its effect of the space in which it being played. The effect of that listening experience underlined to me that the sound of instruments like bass drums integrate with the room acoustics. I’ll never forget that!

I ‘remember’ the way it excites me, and I have had set-ups with a single bass speaker and with a pair, and, although it depends on the recording setup of course, I have ‘believed’ the bass reproduction from stereo bass speakers and found it more exciting. I know that there are many room resonances down there which are bound to ‘fog’ the ‘stereo-ness’ of the bass, and it is believed by many that there is no point in having stereo speakers as low down as, say 40Hz. My experience strongly suggests otherwise.

When I run a low frequency tone through the left hand speaker but not through the right, it clearly sounds as though it is coming from the left, and vice-versa. ‘Nuff said – it does affect the reproduction.

Alasdair Lawrance

A long time ago I remember a review of a Ravi Shankar concert, where the reviewer didn’t realise he (Shankar) was playing through ELSs until the mic was touched by something.  

I have a B&O sub. and I can certainly tell where the bass is coming from, even in busy soundtracks.

John Howell

You can see why I like the old KEFs, very light but ridged diaphragms, admittedly driven from the voice coil in the centre.  I discovered them at the Audio Fair in the Russell Hotel in 1966.

As regards miking the bass drum, I do like a sound with "a room around it" thus the importance of any screens and overall drum mikes.

Pat Heigham

My best listening experience at the Russell Hotel was of a jazz band being replayed from an Ampex deck at 30 ips, into Tannoy Autographs (Don’t know what the amps were). That was an amazing, practically ‘live’ sound!

Working with Nick Ware on a C4 programme "Music in Time", we picked up a bit of the Verdi Requiem, given in St. Vitus’ Cathedral in Prague. When the guy whacked the tam-tam, the sound travelled all the way up the aisle, bounced off the end wall, and came back down again!  There was plenty of room around it – like cathedral sized! Fantastic!

Nick Ware

My best listening experience at the Russell Hotel was going into the Shure demonstration room and finding that they were using my GUILD LP of Christopher Dearnley playing the St Paul’s Cathedral organ. I can’t remember what the speakers were, but when I said I’d recorded the disc they gave me a free V15/3 cartridge. The last piece on the disc was a work by Niels Gade which builds up to full organ, right at the end of the side – worst case scenario for vinyl, but with the V15/3 it sounded wonderful. Later, when the V15/4 was launched, one of those turned up in the post too!

Hugh Sheppard

I’ve read:

“… High FLAC fidelity is here! As part of a trial run with BBC R&D you can now listen to BBC Radio 3 at the highest possible audio quality. The second stage of the trial will be during the BBC Proms 2017….”

OK.  What is it and how do I get it – and can I play it through my Rogers LS 3/5A’s?

Layman’s language please – and is it only on the internet?

Bernie Newnham

There’s a BBC R and D post here –
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-04-radio-3-high-quality-flac-dash

But is it better than just listening on FM?

There was a trial, but only with Firefox – the pilot ended 10th September 2017.

You could compare with R3 ordinary streaming, but being a pleb, they sounded the same to me.

Keith Wicks

Here’s an extract from the taster projects site:

—————————

Do I need any special equipment?

Because the specification for how to do this is so new, only Firefox (51 or greater) on desktop is able to play our stream, but in time we hope other browsers, mobile devices and internet radio manufacturers will follow suit, and we are actively engaging with vendors to make this happen.

You don’t need any special hardware to enjoy our lossless stream – whatever you normally use to enjoy Radio 3 will do.

Note that you’ll need a decent broadband connection – we’d recommend at least 2mbps to avoid buffering.

—————————

Dave Plowman

It is only on the internet – and you may need to find suitable software for your computer.

Terry Meadowcroft

Sadly I can’t take part in these experiments because as far as I can discover, there are no browsers for Windows XP which are up-to-date enough to deal with the FLAC dash content. I downloaded the Firefox browser as recommended on the developments home site, but there is no Firefox version for XP which can cope with FLAC dash. Shame; it would have been good to have.

If anybody knows of such a browser I would like to know.

Bernie Newnham

I suppose the question one has to ask is why XP. It’s terribly old and vulnerable, and W 10 is very good.

Terry Meadowcroft

… and the answer to your very good question  is that for one reason and another, I have to watch the pennies carefully now, in my retirement!

Also there is so much ‘stuff’ from down the years on my Good ol’ XP desktop, it would take until I’m 90 to get it all transferred and working. As anyone who’s been here knows, things take longer as one gets older and they don’t seem to put as many hours in each day!

[Ed: quite some discussion on dual drive machines, Vista and XP, and associated issues.]

John Nottage

I stuck with XP on my desktop computer till earlier this year. The combination of failing hardware and increasing lack of software support forced me to a new computer – with Win10. As I had already gone from Win8.1(rubbish) to Win10 on the laptop, it was no great strain. The best investment I made was a little gadget with USB connector at the back and a hard disc drive socket on top. I was able to remove both drives from the old machine before I slung it and still be able to access all my old data on the new one, dropping each HDD into this gadget as needed. Now everything is copied, I just use it for an isolated back up drive.