Floorstanding loudspeakers — Legacy Audio V System

The V System is a semi-active floorstanding loudspeaker from Legacy Audio, a 4-way design with twelve drivers per side, dipolar midbass units and built-in bass amplification. It is supplied together with the Wavelet processor, a Boehmer Audio design that works as the digital crossover, DAC and preamplifier of the system.

Key specs that matter

Legacy specifies a response of 16 Hz to 30 kHz within 2 dB. Sensitivity is 98 dB and nominal impedance is 4 ohm for the upper midrange and treble section, which is driven by external amplifiers. Built-in ICEpower class D modules supply 1,000 W to the lowest bass and 500 W to the upper bass. The cabinet is described as an 8.3 dipole system in which the two lowest bands are active and the two upper bands passive. Each cabinet measures roughly 183 cm high, 48 cm wide and 48 cm deep and weighs about 100 kg.

Engineering and use context

Two 4 inch Air Motion Transformer tweeters produce the treble, set in a horizontally concave V shape. Two 6 inch curvilinear drivers cover the upper midrange, and two 14 inch carbon and pulp cones handle the lower midrange and midbass in a dipolar pattern that radiates to the front and rear. The low end uses a 12 inch aluminum-diaphragm woofer in a sealed enclosure plus a second 12 inch aluminum unit driving three 10 inch mass-loaded passive radiators. The Wavelet processor accepts USB, coaxial and optical digital signals, has two XLR and two RCA analogue inputs, and provides four XLR and four RCA outputs for feeding the amplifier channels. A tablet app gives adjustment of brilliance, low treble, upper bass, mid bass, low bass and punch, with eight memory banks for storing settings, and each speaker is calibrated at the factory individually and as a stereo pair. The passive radiators add moving area to the lowest band without extra motors, which is how the 12 inch active driver can reach so deep from a cabinet of this size.

Pairing

Because the bass sections carry their own amplifiers, the owner supplies two external stereo amplifiers, or four channels in total, for the midrange and treble bands, fed from the processor outputs. With the high sensitivity those channels need little power to reach high levels in a 20 m2 room or a much larger one, so compact class A or valve amplifiers are practical if they can drive a low impedance load without strain. Since the processor already contains the DAC and the preamplifier stage, a digital source can connect straight to it and no extra control unit is required in the chain.

Alternatives

The Legacy Audio Signature XD is a smaller semi-active floorstander with 650 W of internal bass amplification in a 122 cm tall sealed cabinet.