British loudspeaker designer Phil Ward has opened orders for the LS3/5X, a compact passive two-way that revisits the BBC’s LS3/5A with modern low-distortion drivers. The sealed design pairs a long-excursion Purifi bass/midrange driver with a waveguide-loaded dome tweeter and a 1.4 kHz crossover. Hand-built in small numbers and sold direct at £4,999 per pair, the LS3/5X retains the original BBC monitor’s proportions and damped birch-plywood construction.
Phil Ward is recognized in the audio industry as one of the most thoughtful and technically grounded reviewers with an extensive career as a freelance writer, and particularly as a contributor to Sound On Sound magazine. Less known is that his work as a writer, spanning professional audio and hifi, draws on more than four decades of loudspeaker design experience and consultancy projects. Ward began his engineering career at Mordaunt-Short in 1982 and went on to design and development roles at Canon Audio and Naim Audio. As a consultant, he designed Acoustic Energy’s AE22 nearfield monitor and led the electroacoustic design of Stratton Acoustics’ debut loudspeaker, the Elypsis 1512. As he says, “The LS3/5X isn’t my first design rodeo. Just the first one with my name on it.”
This latest project began with a conversation between Ward and Andy Whittle of Rogers Hi-Fi about what the BBC monitor might do with contemporary drive units. Developed for monitoring in spaces too confined for larger loudspeakers, the original LS3/5A used KEF’s B110 bass/midrange driver and T27 tweeter in a cabinet barely 31cm high. Ward kept that compact format as a design constraint and started with a single prototype to collect acoustic data and model crossover options. By June 2026, he had built the first pair representative of the intended production design.
This interesting project follows a different path through BBC monitor history from the Rogers LS5-9 revival previously covered by audioXpress, which returned to the original BBC specifications. In his personal website, Ward shared many of his prototype notes and first-pair build.
In a sealed cabinet this small, the bass/midrange driver has to make substantial excursions while still reproducing the midrange cleanly. Ward chose a 130mm (5.25”) Purifi USHINDI driver with an aluminum cone and a specified ±9.8mm of linear travel. Its motor is designed to keep force factor and voice-coil inductance more stable as the coil moves, while the Neutral Surround reduces changes in effective radiating area between inward and outward strokes. audioXpress has examined those same design principles in a related paper-cone Purifi driver and covered a different application of the technology in the Radiant Acoustics Clarity 6.2, which uses two passive radiators to extend its bass response.
At the top end, an SB Acoustics aluminum-ceramic dome tweeter combines an underhung motor with a resonance below 700Hz. The waveguide adds acoustic gain at the lower end of the tweeter’s range, helping Ward cross the drivers at 1.4kHz with a symmetrical third-order electrical network. The low crossover frequency helps limit vertical lobing, while the waveguide helps match the drivers’ horizontal dispersion through the handoff. It also changes the structure of the cabinet. The thin birch-plywood shell still uses hardwood corner fillets and bitumen damping, but the drivers mount to a 15mm resin-impregnated Permali panel, with a second 15mm composite material forming the waveguide and stiffening the front assembly.
In the published production design and specifications, Ward specifies an on-axis response of 80Hz to 20kHz within ±1.5dB, with the sealed-box response reaching 46Hz at -6dB. At 85dB SPL measured at 1 meter, he reports harmonic distortion below 0.3% above 150Hz and below 0.1% above 1kHz. The trade-off is sensitivity, rated at 81dB for 2.83V at 1m in half-space. Nominal impedance is 8Ω, with a 6.5Ω minimum at 150Hz. The cabinet measures 310 × 194 × 174mm, and each speaker weighs 7.1kg.
Since Phil Ward’s recent consultancy work includes the electroacoustic design of Stratton Acoustics’ debut Elypsis 1512 — a stunning design, inspired by the iconic main studio monitors that shaped recording in the 1970s and 1980s — it seems that this build has benefited from that cabinet design experience. The promoted model of the LS3/5X features an oak-veneered birch plywood cabinet with a white front baffle made from HiMACS Solid Surface, a mineral powder/resin composite material that combines the plasticity of wood with the resistance of stone.
The LS3/5X is available to order in rosewood, walnut, oak, or olive cabiner finishes, with the same satin-white waveguide panel and the same Tygan grille fabric over the bass/midrange drivers as the original BBC monitors. Ward requires a £1,500 deposit and estimates a minimum three-month build time, subject to component availability. Shipping and any applicable import duties and taxes are additional.
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