In article ,
tony sayer wrote:
Apart, rather obviously, with the 3/5a which you describe as junk.
Whose designers should be shot. Without being able to give an example
of speaker designed at the same time which was better.

Don't think many loudspeaker manufacturers had an "on the tap" live
radio studio to help develop them..

Interesting point. I've never worked in radio, and dunno if the designers
made use of any of the facilities there. Apart from getting high quality
recordings of whatever they wanted, of course. The departments who
designed these speakers were both based well away from the studio centres.
I don't remember any prototype speakers doing the rounds in TV.

But then, to the best of my knowledge, the 3/5a wasn't used at TC for
monitoring. More an OB speaker. It may have been in some small edit
facilities, but not something I know about.

Do have a little story about them at TC, though.

TC3 was modernised in the early 70s. Went from an elderly BBC type B desk
to a large Neve. And at the same time had an all singing and dancing BBC
designed talkback system installed. And instead of the usual poor
bandwidth mics and amps etc, was designed to full broadcast quality.
Talkback mics were AKG 451, and the talkback speakers in sound control
LS3/5a. For all of a couple of weeks. Why? The quality was simply too
good. Just as good if not better than speech being broadcast, which could
used the same mics. And rather better if personal mics were in use.

The 3/5a were changed for single cone RS PA quality speakers. With the
typical colouration of a small cheap speaker.

Some said we told you so. Waste of money having excellent quality
talkback. But degrading it at the last moment at the speaker meant you
didn't have the usual noise and distortion etc of a badly designed system.

--
*Kill one man and you're a murderer, kill a million youand 're a conqueror.

Dave Plowman London SW
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