A good loudspeaker combines
a high degree of accuracy with untrammeled musicality. There
aren't many of those around - common wisdom has it that you
can have one or the other but never both. The LS1 is the first
speaker to prove conventional wisdom wrong.
“This speaker is explicitly for those who want the most neutral and transparent sound reproduction, no corners were cut.”
True accuracy is about getting all the bits in the right
place: not losing anything, not adding anything either. The
LS1 offers this accuracy, reproducing a truly musical recording
accurately, with all beauty intact.
Looking at the design, the box is much wider than it is deep, the small (14 litres) sealed box is designed to provide an effective baffle down to around 250Hz. It is suspended between two half cylinders that combat diffractions and function as an integral two-legged floor stand. An 8” magnesium woofer and a 1” dome tweeter divide the work between them.
Housed in one of the two legs are the drive electronics, encompassing two 200W Class D power amplifiers, a 56-bit DSP, digital I/O, AD/DA and the same clock circuit as our CC1 master clock.
The concept of the LS1 draws maximum benefit from intelligent application of DSP technology. An IIR crossover imposes exact LR4 acoustic slopes crossing at 1550Hz, and the phase is subsequently corrected using an idealised inverted all-pass filter, resulting in a maximally linear phase response without any pre-echo’s. This removes the “digital loudspeaker sound signature” typical of the more ubiquitous impulse inverted FIR designs.
Despite their compact size, the floor standing speakers offer full bandwidth performance. The DSP controlled analog subwoofer output allows for perfect and easy integration with stereo subwoofers, for those that need high SPL performance below 40 Hz.
unidirectional down to 250 Hz