Lowther for Life

Lowther PM5A full-range loudspeakers: $1500 per pair (drivers only); Medallion II loudspeaker enclosures: $2050 per pair. Drivers and enclosures distributed by Lowther America, PO Box 4758, Salem, OR 97302. (503)370-9115; fax: (503)000-0000.

The observation that most people have things backwards is not new.

Examples in the here and now abound (my favorite: the canonization of a doddering plutocratic boil like Ronald Reagan while Jimmy Carter is all but reviled), but I think the phenomenon achieved a kind of purity in the late 60s and early 70s. As evidence, I point to

* the escalation of the war in Viet Nam as a means of ending the conflict (i.e, "bombing for peace");

* Detroit's dedication to ever-larger automobiles in the face of dwindling Middle East oil supplies; and,

* the hi-fi industry's move toward very ineffecient loudspeakers and the grotesque power amplifiers required to drive them.

That last one was inevitable, especially the part about the amplifiers. Once the industry's Big Lie No.1 had been forced down our throats (i.e., that measurements reveal everything you need to know about hi-fi gear--and so, according to the geniuses at Stereo Review, everything sounds the same), it was time to sell the public on Big Lie No.2: Since everything sounds the same, the only reason to choose one amplifier over another is the quest for more power. And more is always better.

But hi-fi has always had a few right-thinking people, too--the ones who value simplicity and elegance, and who never abandoned the idea that more hardware seldom if ever equals more music.

A lot of those folks, I've come to realize, are Quad ESL owners. Now I'm starting to wonder if perhaps the rest of them aren't Lowther owners.

Lowther, nee Voigt, is a small English company that's been around forever, and is known primarily for its line of very efficient, full-range drivers. Lowther makes other sorts of speakers, as well, and the company has designed and occasionally even built some very elaborate cabinets for their products. But for the most part, when you're talking about "a Lowther," you're talking about a speaker with a six-inch paper cone, a concentric paper "whizzer" at its center for the high frequencies, and a humongous magnet.

There's more to it than that, of course--and there's lots of Lowther lore for enthusiast types, built around such Sidcupiana as magnet material (alnico, rare earth, or ceramic), magnet size (large, very large, or Ann Wilson), pole piece material (soft iron or Permandor), voice coil impedance (8 or 15 ohms), and voice coil material (aluminum or silver). These all play a role in differentiating one Lowther model from the next, and all seem to have their respective proponents and detractors.

What all Lowthers have in common--and what loudspeakers from most other companies lack entirely--is a "naturally" high level of electrical sensitivity. The Lowther drivers that are most commonly used full-range are between 96 and 98 dB efficient as measured in free air. They act that way because of their--

* very low-mass cones that are hand-made from light, stiff, cream-colored paper and embossed for rigidity (God help me, I almost said "ribbed for her pleasure");

* very short, light voice coils, wound onto both sides of the (paper) former;

* those extremely powerful magnets; and,

* an almost absurdly small magnetic gap--1 millimeter, in fact.

There's one other thing you'll find in modern Lowther drivers, and that's an iron-rich paint called "Hi-Ferric," which is used to coat the voice coil and give it magnetic properties of its own. This keeps the coil centered in that tiny gap, and provides electrical damping, too, by keeping the cone in neutral when a signal isn't asking it to go forward or backward. Hi-Ferric is controversial stuff, though: Not all Lowther fans think it's a good idea, so the factory and its distributors offer the option of having nothing at all applied to the voice coil, for free.

Okay, so what do you get from all this Permandor, Alcomax, and Hi-Ferric? On paper (sorry), the typical Lowther driver is lightning fast. But owing to its comparatively small excursions as much as its less-than-wooferous size, Lowthers don't make a whole lot of bass. So if you want to get even the next-to-the-bottom-octave out of a six-inch, small-excursion Lowther driver, you have to be clever in the ways of enclosure design. And here comes that most highly charged of all hi-fi words:

Horn.

Lowthers, as you'll find, make prodigious amounts of midrange sound; the last thing they need is any help in that department. So the Lowther cabinet designer is well advised to aim the front of the driver right at the listener and not enhance its direct radiation. But you do want to take the rear wave of the driver--most notably its low frequency content--and amplify it by means of a horn.

That's a poor choice of words, though. A horn isn't an amplifier--it's a transformer. Putting a vibrating diaphragm together with an air column that goes from a small throat at one end to a big mouth at the other makes for a good impedance match between that diaphragm and the mass of air in the room, greatly increasing efficiency. That sounds like a good thing--but keep in mind that horns have their prices. They're difficult to design correctly. They're difficult to construct. And to get any kind of deep bass at all from a horn (which acts as a natural high-pass filter) is difficult unless you make the horn very, very large.

That last one has a psychological component, too: No audiophile wants to buy, build, install, or otherwise dick around with a very large loudspeaker unless he's getting lots of bass out of the deal. That's how these things are supposed to work--right? If you spend a lot of money on something big, then at the very least it is expected to positively impact that which even your stupidest friends can hear in an instant: BASS.

Horns ignore that rule. But their physical size helps them in a different, equally important way--and that's scale. Horns, even if they don't go terribly deep, load a room nicely. They can sound big at the same time as they sound intimately detailed and nuanced, and that's a trick no other speaker type pulls off in quite the same way.

But for the most part, it's the quest for efficiency and extreme dynamics that motivates horn enclosure use, and that's certainly on the minds of those audiophiles who have discovered the musical pleasures of using very small, very simple amplifiers. A Lowther driver is efficient in and of itself; once it's horn loaded (even if it's just the rear wave), the sensitivity of the overall loudspeaker system goes even higher. So to be a horn-loaded Lowther in 1998 is a little like being a Muddy Waters record in 1965: All of a sudden, after years of being ignored, lots of people want you again.

The Pacific Northwest Triode Mafia (as distinguished from our friend Herb Reichert and the New York Triode Mafia) were among the first to investigate the magical combination of Lowthers and single-ended amplifiers, especially those based on the 2A3 output tube. Two Oregonians in particular got real interested: Tony Glynn went so far as to set up a Lowther distribution group for the USA, and audio designer Jennifer Crock (whose Jena Labs cables are finding favor with a growing audience) began to design enclosures for them.

Back in the Spring, Tony and I decided that it was time for Listener to look into the whole Lowther thing--and it seemed to both of us that the best idea would be for me to borrow a pair of Lowther PM2A drivers (which, at $1250 per pair, are neither the least nor most expensive of the line) and to apply my DIY leanings to Lowther America's brand new enclosure kit: Jennifer Crock's Medallion II, a tuned-column rear-wave horn that stands just shy of four feet tall. Well, that sounded fine to me--and that's what we would've done, had a few unforseen complications not raised their ugly little heads. So for the interim, I was sent a finished pair of Medallion II cabinets and a pair of Lowther's upmarket PM5As.

The Medallion II cabinets and Lowther PM5As (which for simplicity's sake I'll just lump together and refer to as the Lowthers, if you don't mind) arrived here the day before a few of our writers and other assorted friends were due to visit. Good timing--and a good reason to get to work and make these speakers give their all.

Uncrating the 90-pound (empty) cabinets in my driveway and inching them into the house was hard enough; getting them to sound right was even harder. I started with the Lowthers positioned where most speakers do their best in my room: a couple of feet away from the back wall, somewhat less than that from the side walls, and toed in toward the listening area. I switched on my system, taking care to follow the Lowther company's advice to leave the volume down for two minutes before playing music (this appears to "energize" the voice coils, lettng them center themselves in that tiny gap before doing any work). I was astounded by how off things sounded: There was no bass at all, and both channels were even a little bit raspy and harsh. Wheee.

I called Tony Glynn, and he suggested that the drivers might just need to settle in and, yes, get re-centered in their gaps, after the travails of traveling. (The rasp can result from a binding voice coil; a binding voice coil can result from a misaligned cone and former.) Tony's first suggestion was to gently "massage" each cone and help it physically get centered while music was playing. His second suggestion was to rotate either or both drivers in their cabinet openings by 180 degrees. For now, I just did the first one--the massaging thing.

By the end of that day I was getting somewhere: The harshness was almost all gone, and the Lowthers seemed to be making a little more bass, too. I had also reoriented the cabinets from being toed in to aiming them straight ahead, so's to take the listener out of the high frequencies' direct line of fire.

But most of all, and apart from any thoughts of how they sounded, the Lowthers were already playing music. Everything was whole, present, and lively--and the bass in particular (what there was of it) startled me with its quickness: This was, after all, a megaphone-d back wave I was listening to below, say, 200 Hz, and it didn't sound the least bit delayed or sluggish compared to everything else.) Especially at lower volumes, these speakers were really engaging and fun to listen to--an observation confirmed several times over when Janet came home. Listening from the other room, at least, she was thrilled by the Lowthers, and requested record after record. There was still a trace of rasp, and there wasn't much happening below 70 or 80 Hz--but I went to bed confident that our guests would at least find the Lowther experience to be an interesting and promising one.

Well, the party took place as planned, and by the time the system got switched on that day, everyone had had a few--so right off the bat, you know we were playing records too loud. And as I've learned, you don't want to--you don't really NEED to--play music too loud on Lowthers. Plus, we kept crowding more people into my listening room than it could really accommodate. Finally, I must admit that I still didn't have them set up even half-way right. The results? Very mixed. Listener's Mike Trei and Stanalog's George Stanwick considered the speakers musically engaging on at least some material, but most of our guests found the Lowthers bass-shy and somewhat aggressive.

Hmmm.

Janet and I were disappointed by all this, because we were already enjoying the Lowthers very much--while acknowledging their shortcomings and the ways in which they force the listener to change their habits somewhat, especially regarding where they can and cannot sit and what not to expect in the way of stereo effects or bass depth. We chalked it up to various things: drivers not yet centered, system played too loud, balance and presentation not to people's tastes, that sort of thing.

I went back to listen by myself the next day. And, no, the Lowthers' problems weren't lost on me. Plus, there was virtually no stereo effect with the speakers set up this way (almost nothing at all in the middle), and definitely not enough bass to balance off the highs. And there was still a little extra emphasis in the low trebles, with a complementary suckout in the very high midrange. Forget the audiospeak--the system still sounded a little screwy.

But the thing is: I listened to Daphnis and Chloe (BSO/Munch on a Classic Records LP reissue), and it was thoroughly, completely captivating. Then and there in my listening room, the extent to which Ravel's contemporaries were outraged by his harmonies seemed much more important than the extent to which most audiophiles might be outraged by the Lowthers' shortcomings.

Back to work. First, the Lowthers did continue to break in and smooth out--so, among other things, I eventually found myself able to toe them back in without fear of the on-axis low trebles ripping my ears off. From that point on, at least some suggestion of stereo imaging returned to my listening room. Then, after trying a great many spots in the room, I wound up placing the cabinets very close to the back wall--a mere 3 inches at the closest point, with the side ranging between 11 and 17 inches from the nearest side wall (remember, they were toed-in). So some bass was back, too--maybe down to 60 Hz by now.

There was still a faint shade of that treble emphasis, but it was a lot less troubling--probably because the speakers were now further away from the listeners. And there was now a nice bit of stereo image development between the spakers, and even a suggestion of depth. Better all in all--but still not optimal. On most classical music, for example, loud passages were still too aggressive and too glare-y: The first big tutti in Elgar's Cello Concerto with Du Pre remained harsh, for example.

I tried reorienting the drivers halfway around, per Tony Glynn's sugestion. The thing is, the Lowthers' magnets are so massive (picture a saucepan hanging off the back of a six-inch speaker) that they can, over time, distort even these speakers' rugged cast-aluminum frames somewhat. When the voice coil gap measures one millimeter, "somewhat" is more than enough, and the former and coil can now rub against one side of the gap, which is not good. Turning the driver around 180 degrees relieves this condition. (Rotating a Lowther 90 or 270 degrees is not possible, given the frame's odd shape.)

That helped, too. Peaks were less sonically peaky, though no less stirring, musically.

I ran them in some more. I played Dohnanyi's Rheingold while I was doing things in the other room (I seldom ever listen that way), then, that night, I played the great EMI recording of Poulenc's Piano Concerto with Cecille Ousset and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Wow--there it was: even greater musicality (rightness of notes and beats plus sheer emotional involvement) as well as improved sound. Tuttis were less harsh, and the sound had undergone a welcome smoothing, from top to bottom. Dynamically, it was unlike anything I'd ever heard; from subtle distinctions to big climaxes, the Lowther experience is as close to being fooled by a recording's dynamics as I've ever come. These things really can jar you out of your seat!

Consider, for instance, Columbia's 1947 La Boheme with Bidu Sayao and Richard Tucker. The latter's "Che gelida manina" offers a fine example of the Lowthers' musical dynamics--not from a Patriot Games, startling-sounds-for-imbeciles school of audio observations, but rather on the level of emotional effectiveness. When you hear how gracefully, suddenly, and easily Tucker's voice climbs the intensity scale on this mono recording, you come to the realization that the Lowthers do with dynamics what a Linn LP12 or a Fi 2A3 amp does with notes: They sing.

The next Saturday I was in the mood for something on the folkie side. I started by playing Traffic's "John Barleycorn Must Die," mostly because I'd been driving myself crazy for a day trying to remember all the words. It was a lot of fun on the Lowthers--but what an awful recording! I'd forgotten how grainy it was throughout, and how downright distorted in the peaks (and all of that came through faithfully over the Lowthers). Then I tried the Vanguard stereo LP of Doc Watson On Stage--and I wished it would never end. Oh my gosh, there were buckets of presence and realism! Thrilling dynamics and generally uncolored sound--a level of musical involvement unheard of this side of the old Quads, and in some ways maybe even greater (Janet thinks so, at least).

Doc's voice was right there. The guitars (and occasional banjo) were so present I could have told you which frets needed dressing. And as a bonus, whenever the audience broke into applause, the stage just naturally increased in size to accommodate the big hall sound. A Great Experience.

There's more, but I'll tell you now: By this point in the proceedings, I was just about sold. For all their idiosyncracies, it seems that Lowthers really do make music like nothing else.

I had begun to wonder, though: How much of what I'm hearing is the enclosure and how much is the Lowther? And as far as the Lowther is concerned, how much of what I'm hearing--good and bad--is the PM5A as opposed to other Lowthers? (The PM2A, although less expensive, is held by some to be the best of the bunch; its soft iron pole piece, they say, makes for a less aggressive treble.)

The latter will have to wait until I receive my own PM2As (due any day as I write this). As to the former, my luck came in when I received a call from David Clark of DC Audio, a designer and builder of horn enclosures and an authorized Lowther agent in his own right. Turns out DC Audio is here in upstate New York, just a couple of hours away--so the invitation to come and listen was one I could happily accept.

Clark, who is a master woodworker (cabinetry is his stock in trade, and he has a few custom yachts to his credit as well), wanted me to hear the Faircurve ii, his newest Lowther creation. Selling for approximately $5500 a pair (that includes Lowther PM2A drivers), the Faircurve ii is also a rear-wave horn, but with a few twists. The front baffle of this goreous cabinet is, indeed, curved, and that curve extends smoothly into the mouth of the horn at the bottom. Also, the tuned column inside has a couple of 180-degree bends (also smoothly executed), and these tend to act as a low-pass filter: Short, directional wavelengths as found in higher frequencies mostly don't survive the trip around such tight bends.

The refinements built into the DC cabinets don't stop there, but the important thing is that the Faircurves do indeed sound smoother and richer than the Medallions. I don't know if Clark's loudspeakers go much deeper in the bass (my impression is that they don't go much lower than maybe 50 or 60 Hz), but they are sonically more impressive than the cheaper Medallions. Clark believes that has a lot to do with keeping frequencies about 300 Hz out of that horn--and you can hear that that's so: Stick your head into the mouth of a Medallion and you'll hear a surprisingly wide-range sound; do the same thing with a Faircurve and you'll pretty much just hear bass.

My impression: If any of you rich guys want to start your Lowther journey off on the right foot, then just order up a pair of these. (You can call DC Audio at 914/888-2360.) If your system of values and beliefs can accommodate the idea of a very large speaker which makes comparatively little low bass, you'll be getting something which makes much more music than anything presently on display at The Great High End Salons.

The Faircurves, it must be said, also show what a great bargain the Medallion II approach is in its own right--and for cheap assholes like me, they're a genuinely excellent way to start down the road to Lowther Land. Just make sure it's a road you want to travel in the first place--so you had better consider the following:

* Word has it that brand-new Lowther drivers take a very, very long time to break in. I don't know about that, since the ones I've heard so far have already had some miles on them.

But I do know this: Whenever my loaner Lowthers have gone unplayed for as little as a weekend, they sounded rough when I went to use them again. That roughness gets worked out in just about an hour--but still: Isn't that amazing? I suppose it has to do with that tiny gap, and how it takes a while for the magnetized coil to get itself all nice and centered and stuff.

* Even fully broken in, the Lowther PM5A never loses what I've come to think of as its "presence zones"--a couple of blocks in the midrange and upper midrange/lower high neighborhoods where the drivers are just a little exuberant. But this probably won't trouble you at all as long as you keep in mind that

* you must listen to these speakers from further away than you do with other speakers. First, they want to be close to the wall behind them to get all the clean bass reinforcement they can. Second, they do portray scale realistically--but you'll need to be a ways away to appreciate it. Third, it seems to me you have to get at least six or seven feet away from the Medallions before they sound really coherent. Perhaps it just takes that much space for the directly radiated sound and the horn radiated sound to blend. I don't know.

* You will want to use only very low-power, very high quality amplifiers with Lowthers. One of the reasons for the former is that the Lowther voice coil can take just so much power before it either loosens up and binds in the gap or blows altogether. So repeat after me:

You don't need more than a few watts. You don't need more than a few watts. You don't need more than a few watts. You don't need...

Also, the Lowthers will (forgive the hackneyed audio critic expression) mercilessly expose any shortcomings in the quality of your amplifier. What I said last issue about the Quad ESLs is even truer here: Spending the extra money for a pair of Western Electric 300B tubes to use in your Cary, Audio Note, Wavac, Wavelength, Fi, Komura, Morrison, Art Audio, Sun Audio, or whatever amplifier will be a fine idea for the Lowther owner. Yes, they love 300B amps--and although I've only tried the Fi version so far, it seems they positively adore 2A3s.

* These speakers, more than any other I have ever heard in my life, will constantly remind you of the differences between analog and digital. To put it succinctly: Lowthers love vinyl, but they are indifferent to CDs.

If you're one of the good souls who's trying to break free of the sad, tired old high-end, "let's listen for colorations and soundstaging" paradigm--and you're not really sure what we mean about a system's ability to just play music as contrasted with its ability to make impressive sound--then try to audition a pair of Lowthers with both LP and CD sources. You will, I guarantee, hear the distinction right away: The LPs will play music--will, in fact, sing; the CDs will, at best, play music less convincingly, but otherwise will probably just sound good.

* This one isn't exactly a negative, but: Audiophile friends who listen to records for sonic thrills as opposed to musical enlightenment (and upon whom that distinction is forever lost) will make fun of you. If you still count any such people amongst your friends, you will have to put up with nitwits whose concepts of both audio criticism and humor achieve full flowering only when they flap their arms and make goose noises upon seeing horn loudspeakers in somebody's room. (Tell me again why freedom of speech is worth going to war over...?)

There you go. Quite the list--but then, as Tony Glynn or Dave Clark or any other Believer would surely tell you, Lowthers aren't for everybody. But, like hi-fi itself, it seems the Lowther thing will never go away, and will always attract a certain kind of record lover. And, since it's sort of an ongoing story, you can count on us keeping you up to date. In fact, we have already paid for Listener's own sample of the Medallion kit, and we intend to report on its construction--as well as our experiences using various drivers in it--over the issues to come.

Right now, I'm still listening to the PM5A/Medallion II combination, and enjoying them more and more with each record. These loudspeakers are more tactile and dynamic than anything else I've heard. They're also coherent, and altogether, musically right: There's less question here about pitches and beats than with anything else I know. The Lowthers provide a suggestion of stereo imaging (enough for me), but bass is in short supply (barely enough for me). Apart from the apparent frequency response aberrations noted, they are uncolored and very transparent, though not so liquidly transparent as the Quads.

They are great speakers.

The last part of this installment happened at Tanglewood, when I ran into veteran audio writer Hans Fantel. Remembering how he once told me of his fondness for Lowthers, I made sure to corner Hans during the intermission and tell about him what I'd been listening to for the past several weeks. I did. And immediately, a beautiful woman* who was sitting nearby spoke up: "I used to own Lowthers--and I loved them."

"Maybe you should get them back," I replied. And if he'd been there, Tony Glynn surely would've chimed in with the company's advertising slogan: "Lowther for Life."

Quality: four and three-quarters stars and one pancreas

Value: three checks

Coming next: A detailed technological profile and musical comparison of the PM5A and PM2A drivers

*You never mentioned to me she was "beautiful," you worm!--Ass't Ed.