An old frontier, renewed; where technology is at the service of music and allows the performers to communicate directly with the listener’s heart. The perfect synergy makes the equipment disappear and nothing is left but the music’s purity and clarity. It has to be experienced and enjoyed to be appreciated.

The soul of the music is in the midrange, this is where most of the emotion, the passion, the joie de vivre is contained. The music that lifts our soul to the heavens with happiness or drags down to the stygian depths of despair. On a technical level, it’s approx 200 - 4,000Hz. Without a solid foundation underneath the midrange, the music sounds thin & brittle and so un-involving. If the brain perceives that the sound is artificial, then it’s difficult to be swept away by the message contained within the music.

Some audiophiles feel that euphony is the answer, by reducing the extreme high & low frequencies and pushing the midrange forward, but personally I disagree. By narrowing the frequency spectrum, the aural cues, such as the room ambience are removed and with it the veracity of the performance. Once sounds are heard, our hunter-gatherer instincts kick in and we determine what kind of space we are in, large & open, closed & confined, lively or damped. To hear all of those room ambience cues, a system needs to be resolving.

Similarly, accurate timbre reproduction is essential. A New York Steinway does have noticeable sonic differences from a Hamburg Steinway, similarly a Guarneri violin sounds distinct from a Stradivari. To capture all those nuances, the loudspeakers & electronics need to act in unison, neither obscuring detail, nor exaggerating detail. A train running underneath the concert hall in he middle of the third movement of a Mahler symphony is not midrange magic, its just an artifact of the performance. From an audiophile perspective, either the listener is listening to the recording or he or she is listening to the music. This is not a hard & fast rule, but a useful guideline.

To assemble an audio stem capable of resolving the tonal differences and delivering the emotion & passion contained within many of our treasured recorded music cultural treasures.

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• Release of the Graham Audio LS5/5f.

• When we first received the stand mounted  Graham LS5/5 in 2019, we were gob-soaked by it’s sonic performance and yet swept away by it’s delivery of Midrange Magic..  There are many resolute loudspeakers in today’s market but few equal Derek Hughes’ redesigned LS5/5 for its ability to deliver the emotion & passion in the music.  It’s a conduit for midrange magic, capable of uplifting the listener with joy or dropping him to his knees with tears of sadness.  Such is the power of music … the sound of God whispering in your ear. – Philip O’Hanlon, On A Higher Note

• The BBC is very proud of their 1967 LS5/5 and it was considered by many at the BBC to be the pinnacle of loudspeaker design, which they used for monitoring their recordings of the spoken word & music. However, when the Rock n Roll era came about, the engineers found that the LS5/5 would not play loud enough, so they designed & changed over to the LS5/8.

• Our source revealed that the BBC have continued to use the LS5/5 speakers for microphone calibration to ensure that the microphones met the BBC’s technical specifications.  

• Fast forward to 2019, Derek Hughes has cleverly incorporated:  higher quality magnets, drivers, glues, crossover components; the revised LS5/5 now has 10dB greater power handling/output. This is eight times louder than the original. Not to mention, tighter and better defined bass.

• In early 2022, Derek Hughes returned to this seminal design and revised the cabinet and crossover to allow for the greater port volume of a floor standing monitor.

• The LS5/5f has the same driver complement & cabinet as the LS5/5, but has an additional 16” enclosure underneath. The second cabinet underneath the drivers & crossover cabinet, is an acoustic chamber to allow the bass driver to breathe, this ported enclosure, provides increased bass extension and dynamic capability. 

• Though the floor standing version, has an almost identical midrange to its stand-mount sibling, it enjoys 7dB more bass, as measured at 20Hz.

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"We’re excited for this opportunity to share with you; The What’s Best community, our latest products as well as some recent coverage of Von Schweikert Audio. There’s a lot going on at VSA this year so to help keep things organized, I’ve created separate threads for each topic linked here…

1. New Release - Center Stage2 LS Footers designed by Critical Mass Systems for VSA

2. “The Sound of Reality” …what does that mean?

3. New Release - Endeavor Reference Edition

4. New Release - MasterBuilt Audio Reference II cable line Distributed by Von Schweikert Audio

5. Introducing the VR-4jr Upgrades… Also Known as Mods!

Regarding our new products, I’ve provided an overview in each one of these threads, but we expect some questions. Please do not hesitate to leave comments and/or questions in this thread or the individual ones. We’ll try to respond as quickly as possible.

Also, please feel free to message me directly or call the offices at (951) 682-0706. Both myself and our Chief Design Officer Leif Swanson are available to assist with any questions you may have as well as direct you to one of our dealers for a first-hand experience of these new products.

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