| The history of the LS3/5A has been documented by Trevor Butler in an excellent article, A Little Legend, The BBC LS3/5A. originally published in HiFi News and Record Review in January 1989. Fortunately the text of the article is available on the internet and so it saves me having to document the history here. The on-line version does not include the pictures from the article but I have included a number of my own photographs of the inside of a LS3/5a which cross reference. Much of what follows is anecdotal and based on my memory of things my father told me about his time at the BBC. I wish now I had listened more carefully and made notes. If I have made errors or failed to acknowledge someone then I apologise and will of course include any corrections emailed to me. | |
My interest in the LS3/5A grew from my late father, Maurice Whatton's involvement in the project. He worked for the BBC for 35 years, most of which was spent in the now defunct and much mourned Design Department. His early work involved the design of television electronics and I believe he was responsible for a number of projects which included early standards conversion, the memory logic design for the Anchor caption generator and the electronic insertion of the BBC2 logo and colour bars into the testcard. All these designs were done without modern aids like computers and were based on discrete logic circuitry.
The Anchor machine was, if I remember correctly, an extraordinary device which allowed the BBC to electronically insert captions into programmes. It was based around a magnetic disk store which sat on a record turntable (a Garrard, I believe). Prior to this captions for television had been done using manual graphical techniques like Letraset.
I remember him telling me about a NTSC to PAL standards convertor they were working on. The pictures from the output on a PAL monitor looked dreadful and in desperation some engineers flew over from the USA to see why the BBC were complaining so much. When they saw they quality they were astonished and exclaimed that they had never seen television looking so good!
Around this time he took on a bet with some colleagues that he could convert an American NTSC television to PAL. I believe the sum of 50 pounds was at stake, quite a substantial amount at the time. He suceeded and for some time we enjoyed being the only family in the street with a colour television. The TV was UHF only and at the time we were only able to receive one channel, BBC2. Most of the programmes were still in black and white and the colour service had not been officially launched. The set was a monster and needed four people to lift it. With a then huge 26" screen and a black cabinet made from steel about 3 feet square it dominated our living room. It ran from a big Variac to transform the UK mains down to 110V and we were on pain of death if we had dared turn the big knob on the Variac. The NTSC/PAL convertor was a bit of a bodge and there as a 50:50 chance that the phase would be wrong when the TV was switched on leading to very interesting green pictures!
Around 1974(?) my father took on a job of working on the LS3/5A project within Design Dept. The LS3/5 had been developed by T. Sommerville and D. E. Shorter of BBC Research Department at Kingswood Warren and was passed to Design Department in Western House initially for minor modification. What followed was a radical re-design of the speaker.
I don't think my father or his colleagues who worked on the project, Dudley Harwood from Research Department and Ralph Mills at Design Department, had any idea at the time of the challenge the project would represent.
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My father had come from a background of electronic design where everything was reasonably predictable. He was not a music enthusiast and never went to concerts or listened at home for pleasure. The LS3/5A project was approached by him entirely from an engineering perspective. But his eyes (ears!) were opened by how critical the components of the LS3/5a were. I remember several examples of speakers falling both audibly and measureably outside specification because apparently minor changes had been made. On one occasion the bolts holding the drive units to the baffle had been changed (from steel to brass?) causing all the speakers to fall outside specification. On another cabinets had to be rejected because the wood used for the internal cabinet battens was changed from Beech to Pirana Pine. |
Although he was very much an engineer holding similar beliefs to those of Peter Walker of Quad, "if you can hear it you can measure it," my father was very quick to acknowledge Ralph Mills' "golden ears". He said that Ralph was able to listen to a speaker and know what was wrong. Ralph was apparently able to perform Fourier analysis in his head and could draw a speaker's response curve after listening to it! He was always right! The design did depart from the simplistic engineering philosophy of producing a flat response and was "tweaked" as a result of listening tests. Most significantly this gave the LS3/5A's frequency response its characteristic bass "bump" fooling many listeners into believing the LF response was much more extended than it really was.
The design proved so popular within the BBC that kits were made available by Chartwell for purchase by employees under the name, I think of "Project Symphony." Project Symphony LS3/5As can be easily recognised from the simple screw terminals used to connect the speaker wire. They carry no manufacturers logo but a small paper label saying, "Chartwell Electro Acoustics Ltd. Alric Avenue, London, NW10 8RA" was stuck near the terminals. They sound every bit as good as a "real" production LS3/5A and I remember going up with my father to check the pair I use to this day against the reference in the listening room at Western House. Although intended only for BBC staff many pairs were bought by employees on behalf of their friends and Project Symphony speakers come up for sale from time to time on the secondhand market.
The philosophy behind the design of the LS3/5A was based on both good engineering principles and a willingless to listen and make changes as a result. The specification was tightly controlled by the BBC's licensing system with the intention that all LS3/5As should be so closely matched that any two, irrespective of date or manufacturer could be brought together in a matched pair. This tight matching, and the small size of the speaker largely account for the extraordinary stereo imaging that can be achieved.
Properly set up on stands away from walls and in a good room the images are breathtaking. Reproduction of the human voice and acoustic instruments is still, 27 years after the design was started by the BBC, startling. The speaker has many faults, including its inability to handle very low frequencies or high listening levels. As you would expect from a speaker designed for broadcast use it is completely unforgiving of poor source material. But what it does well it does very, very well.
In 1989 there were estimated to be around 60,000 pairs in use worldwide. Rogers alone had made 43,000 pairs by 1988 and at that time the BBC had 3,000 LS3/5as in use.