The Kingswood Warren LS3/5as.

The LS3/5a was developed at BBC Research Department at Kingswood Warren where it was modified and tweaked before being passed to the BBC Design Department for whatever adjustments would be required in order to allow it to be manufacturered by outside licencees.

The first version produced at K.W. was the LS3/5. Rogers intended to produce the LS3/5 and produced literature about the speaker.

However the design was modified by K.W. and very few pairs of LS3/5s went into service. They are extremely rare. The modified speaker was given the designation LS3/5a because it was sufficiently different from the LS3/5 to prevent them being used together in a stereo pair.Only a very few pairs of the Kingswood Warren LS3/5as are known to exist. They can be considered the ultimate LS3/5a because they came out of BBC Research Department and do not contain the "de-tuning" modifications introduced by BBC Design Department. The drive units were highly selected and because of this the crossovers contain fewer components.

I am indebted to Jim Finnie for the following photographs of his K.W. LS3/5as. Jim was very fortunate, he worked at Research Department during the LS3/5a project and was one of the staff who bought the parts to make his own pair up. Jim's speakers were built with the help of the expert technicians at K.W. having heard them I can confirm that they are absolutely superb.

The K.W. LS3/5a should not be confused with the pair commonly known as BBC 1 & 2. This pair were built in BBC Design Department as prototypes for the speakers that would go into production by the licensees. BBC 1 & 2 therefore contain the changes that were necessary to allow the K.W. LS3/5a to be put into production.

Back to main page