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You're bidding on a Legendary BBC Harbeth LS3/5A Memorial Edition aka "Gold Pro" loudspeakers with Gold Platted tweeters, 23 and 24 of 30 speakers ever made!

Quote from the backplates "this loudspeaker was manufactured under a licence from the British Broadcasting Corporation and is an Unique Collectors Item"!

When one talks of 'the BBC sound' it connotes a certain relaxed, easy-to-live with presentation style, where there is an even and uniform distribution of energy across the frequency band, founded on pragmatic engineering.

It's hard to believe now that a public broadcast organisation could be so intimately involved in audio equipment design as the BBC was right up to the 1970's and '80's, but it was, and we as listeners benefit from the maintenance of standards of sound quality every time we watch TV or radio.

The LS3/5a was substantially redesigned in 1988, and the bass unit was revised and as a result a completely new crossover designed, using quite different components and values. Also, the frequency response shown here was, with hindsight, rather optimistic of production Mk1 (so called 15 ohm LS3/5a's) very few of which could achieve such flatness. In particular, a noticeable peak at about 1.3kHz crept into the bass unit's performance over the years, which is not shown in these R&D prototype curves. All Harbeth LS3/5a's - without exception - were Mk2's, which took the performance back to the original 1976 R&D Serial Number 001, and we were the launch supplier of the Mk2 version which we termed the Computer Optimised LS3/5a.

Although the BBC's LS3/5a is synonymous around the world with high quality reproduction, it's twenty five year production run ended in 1999. The manufacturer of the drive units had been unable to assure OEM manufacturers including Harbeth that quality standards could be maintained at a reasonable price, and without drive units production of the LS3/5a was brought to an end.

"Memorial Edition" was the final Herbeth's LS3/5A series, only 30 loudspeakers (15 pairs!) were made and you have an unique opportunity to become an owner of "One of the Ultimate series to be engineered by Harbeth, under the personal supervision of Alan A. Shaw" (another quote from the backplate)!