If I had to sum up the L3c with two phrases, they would be:
1) Pleasant texture and 2) SS&I (sound stage and imaging)
That’s what strikes you first. Going far past just having the speakers ‘disappear’, these bring the performance into your room. Etta James isn’t singing for you, she’s singing TO you. The sonic hologram becomes so involving, that you just waste time and stay up too late.
Then there’s the texture detail. If you’ve been fortunate enough to be able to witness live music before all the lock downs, these bring strings and brass to life. You don’t get artificial detail; this isn’t a steel bodied guitar with stiff strings and a high nut/bridge, with a steel pick. These L3c’s are a Martin or Taylor Dreadnaught with a nylon pick.
They bring the rich, resonant body of those guitar notes, and the natural pluck of the strings, to life. But they don’t do it by adding 3dB from 8khz and up, heh. That’s not detail, anymore than turning the sharpness setting on your old 36” CRT up to max made it into an HDTV.
No, this is real resolution via real drivers, an overly braced cabinet, and real crossover tuning.
So, into The Details:
The L3c is a 6.5” MTM two way using SB Acoustics doped poly midwoofers and the SBA 29mm (really 37mm) ring radiator tweeter. 20.5” long, 13.5” deep, and 9” wide, it weighs over 30 pounds. Not sure on the exact weight, but (as with many Chane things) the density of it strikes you immediately. No marketing speak of magical HDF cabinets (with HDF being only 10% more dense than high grade MDF). Just full 3/4” high grade MDF for every panel and every interior brace. No exceptions. On every L Series model. Lots of interior braces, too. The L3c has at least 3 internal window braces; two dividing the cabinet along its width and one along its length. We’re far past meeting ‘the knuckle rap test’.
Some may ask why *not* the use of an aluminum version of this SBA driver (or the “ceramic”, which is just aluminum with a ceramic coating on top; still mostly aluminum) for this two way design? Jon has touched on this in the past, but that driver has a relatively severe breakup mode above the passband. It doesn’t bring any other benefit to the table. So the logical choice that Jon made was to use the wider bandwidth driver.
Listening Impressions:
These play big. They create an effective illusion of the scale of a a much larger set of speakers. But not at the cost of intimacy. Much like the KEF LS50, the bass you get doesn’t plumb the depths for action movies, but it leaves you generally satisfied across musical genres. It’s a very expensive and nimble sound in the bass. You hear delineated notes and texture that were obscured in the A Series. The body of that upright acoustic bass or double kick drum is conveyed very convincingly. No, you won’t think you’ve got double 18” subs hooked up. But you could easily believe that you were listening to a 10” woofer in a much larger box. These two 6.5” midwoofers have slightly more radiating area than a true 8” woofer. They are tight and dynamic. They apparently feel like they have been shorted in life and endeavor to prove themselves larger than they are.
The bass you do get hits with texture and authority. I reiterate that for music listening in most spaces, you won’t be thinking that you need a sub for anything but the bottom octave. Usable output into the low 30’s and occasionally high 20’s, in room. Down in level, but clean and audible.
However, back to the experience. And I make this segue a a full voting AES member, retired Forensic Audio/Video engineer, former professional Audio/Video engineer, and an expert witness in courts of law in one of the largest states in the country in the field of Forensic Audio Analyses and Enhancement (also in Video). But there’s not a measurement for how much I enjoy these. How much they draw me into the music. It’s easy to get into the music that I have grown up on (classic rock, funk, soul, oldies, some metal, 2000’s hip hop, classic jazz, etc). But these speakers pulled me into a new genre of modern classical music.
I gained a taste for Ludovico Einaudi with the 752’s, but these have pulled me into stuff like Caroline Shaw’s Attaca Quartet. They play IN MY ROOM, directly to me, with the L3c’s. I’ve heard these investments played live many times (usually by friends). I’m here telling you that these songs occurred in my room with the L3c’s. Throw in my tube amp and I swear I could tell the mood of the players as they used their bows and fingers.
The tonal balance of their presentation is inherently neutral. Yes, the on axis and listening window responses are relatively “flat” (though that doesn’t mean much), but they also present without coloration. Slightly more forgiving than the 700’s of flaws in recordings, but still revealing of them, they are great speakers to live with. One can achieve a level of resolution that becomes clinical; these stop just short of that.
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