Up for grabs is my pair of av123 LS-6 speakers. Ive had these for 3 and a half years and they are the best speakers ive ever heard. I believe that even spending $10,000 wont get you speakers better than these.
Click on thumbnails for larger pics
History: these were designed by audio guru danny richie at
Speaker kits, loudspeaker design services, sub-woofers and amplifiers.. av-123 used to sell these, but now the only place you can buy the speakers is for $5000 before shipping from east street audio
East Street Audio. LS6/LS9
As they say: no replacement for displacement. These speakers arent built to simply play loud, theyre built to have enormous headroom and play extremely clean no matter what volume you play them at. I guarantee most people have no idea what distortion free speakers sound like, any conventional B&W or dynaudio or paradigm speaker will run into compression issues because asking a smaller speaker to play reference levels introduces a lot of distortion. Even if you throw 1000 watts at a smaller speaker it cant do anything with most of those watts.
For those interested in the technical science numbers stuff, heres a comparison between the B&W 800D and my LS-6
Lets first compare sensitivities: 800D 90db 1w/1m, this means with one watt at 4 meters away youre only going to get 78db. Even if you have 512 watt amps you will PEAK at 105db when sitting 4 meters away. You need about 10db of room for peaks, so that means the music is playing at about 95db. Really not that loud if youve ever wanted to crank it up for some friends. If you throw more wattage all you'll get is power compression
The LS-6 has 91db 1w/1m sensitivity, but at 4 meters away they play 85db. Pump the same 512 watts into LS-6s and youre at an ear shattering 112db. 112db peaks are probably unnecessary, but taking 800D to 105db means theyll be straining a lot, take the LS-6 to 105db and they wont be straining at all. This is the virtue of headroom.
The LS-6 also will extend to 20hz in most rooms, the 800D has similar bass performance but again, they will run into power compression problems and not hit 20hz at nearly the same sound pressure level as the LS-6
Last but not least is probably one of the most overlooked features of line arrays, and thats their capability to create cylindrical shaped sound waves. This removes interaction with the floor and the ceiling, one of the trickiest areas to treat in most rooms and remove unwanted diffraction and reflection. 800D are typical floor standers and send out "cones" of sound from the drivers that result in lots of reflections of your floor/ceiling which is probably the biggest enemy of accurate music reproduction.
A laymens review of the sound quality of these speakers can be read at
positive feedback and
stereo mojo
Condition of the cabinets:
-2 small flakes of veneer pin sized flakes exist on these 6 foot tall speakers
-The real rosewood veneer is developing “wrinkles” due to its thickness (
example here)
-there are small 1” cracks in the veneer on one speaker that are very hard to photograph (
example here)
-same speaker at 4pm under normal lighting.. cant see the flaws:
example here
Price:
due to the cabinets being b-stock i think its more than fair to ask $2,000 for these speakers.
