Rogers · Classic · Bookshelf

LS3/5A

Product description
The BBC's 1975 miniature monitor, still built under licence by one of the original licensees. It is a sealed 12 mm birch-ply box with beech fillets, 30 cm tall, holding a 110 mm doped Bextrene cone and a 19 mm Mylar dome crossed at 3 kHz — a specification nobody would arrive at today, and the reason it sounds the way it does. Two numbers explain what it asks of a system: 15 ohms nominal, which is high enough that many modern amplifiers never see the load they were designed for, and 82.5 dB, which is low enough that Rogers asks for 30 to 80 watts to drive a speaker that stops at 80 Hz. Every pair is measured and matched by hand and the results filed against the serial number, so a driver can be replaced years later without breaking the match.

Performance — where it sits in the catalog

BassTrebleSensitivityEasy loadCone area
Bass reachTreble reachSensitivityEasy loadCone area
LS3/5A80 Hz20 kHz82.5 dB15 Ω98 cm²
Median45 Hz25 kHz87 dB6 Ω219 cm²
How to read this chart

Each axis spans the range the 453 bookshelves in the catalog actually cover, so equal distance means equal difference — and for cone area and the two frequencies, which are read as ratios, equal distance means equal ratio. The dashed inner ring is where the scale starts, not zero. Ranked within a class because a bookshelf measured against floorstanders is feeble on every axis for the single reason that it is a bookshelf. Cone area is summed from the drive units — no maker publishes it. Bass and treble reach are quoted to different tolerances and only 56% of the catalog says which, so read those two axes as approximate. The grey outline is the median of this speaker's own class, the 381 passive bookshelves — same type, same side of the active/passive line, which matters because the two halves are not the same product: the median active bookshelf carries 155 cm² of cone against the passive median's 219. Median rather than mean, because a handful of very large cabinets would drag a mean above most of the class it claims to describe.

Units
TypeBookshelf
HiFi ladder position#107 of 453 bookshelf
PowerPassive
Height305 mm
Width190 mm
Depth165 mm
Footprint314 cm²
Space taken9.6 L
Weight4.9 kg
EnclosureSealed
Drivers1× 19 mm tweeter (Mylar dome), 1× 110 mm mid-bass (doped Bextrene cone)
Crossover frequency3000 Hz
Frequency response80–20000 Hz (±3 dB)
Sensitivity82.5 dB
Impedance15 Ω
Recommended amp30–80 W
Where to buyCheck availability ↗
Manufacturerrogers-hifi.uk ↗
Product pageOpen product page ↗

Suggested TrueScale comparisons

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