Surprisingly, Spendor's 'Classic' S3/5 loudspeaker has been around for more than a decade, quietly filling the gap made when the evergreen BBC-designed LS3/5a speaker became hard to pin down.

Why 'surprisingly'? Because the UK company hardly sold any of these small standmount monitors in the home country.

With the newly revised S3/5R, the company is hoping to return to the UK once more, placing their products in Blighty's dealers for the first time in years.

Spendor's classic design

Spendor puts these speakers in its 'Classic' range; at a little over a decade old, the S3/5 is almost too fresh-faced to deserve Classic status in Spendorland. If anything deserves the 'classic' title though, it's the S3/5R.

It's a quintessentially British two-way sealed thin-walled, heavy-damped box speaker design, cut to the same cloth as the BBC LS3/5a design.

The speaker cabinet retains the same basic dimensions of the previous S3/5 model and is, more or less, the same size as speakers like the LS3/5a and original Linn Kan small box speakers.

The principle differences between the S3/5R and its predecessor, are a different form of damping material (on the inside) and the move from bi-wire back to single-wired speaker connection.

The move back to single wire connection is to ensure consistency; use different grades of cable for the treble and bass end and you can - in extremis - create an unbalanced sound. The rubberised internal damping pads are said to be stable across a wider temperature range than their bitumenised predecessors, which is also claimed to make the speaker more consistent.

Inside the speaker units

The big changes are to the drivers, with a new Spendor-built 140mm homopolymer polypropylene bass driver with a 25mm voice coil and focusing magnet motor pole extension (that bullet-shaped phase plug), which helps to make the speaker driver more consistent sounding.

This is better ventilated than previous Spendor drive units, too, which means it can take power more readily than before.

Spendor doesn't make its own tweeters, handing the task on to Vifa, but there's a change here, too. The S3/5R's bass unit necessitated a move to a new 20mm soft dome tweeter.

In the process, the new unit has less spurious output than the previous tweeter, which is said to keep the tweeter sweeter and cleaner in the high frequencies.

With the move to single wired input and new drivers throughout, the crossover had to be completely redesigned. Board mounted, the new crossover circuit has been completely redesigned and re-laid out to minimise magnetic interaction between the inductors.

Improved components

It also required new filters and higher-saturation inductors to help the new drivers fit the S3/5R profile.

The crossover layout is said to improve phase alignment and helps Spendor's well-known goal of pair-matching the speakers to within a single dB. In other words, this is not a revoicing, more a series of refinements.

Owners of the original S3/5 speakers would have no need to 'upgrade' whatsoever. The advantages of a decade's worth of materials, science developments and technological updates, makes for a far better on-paper speaker and a slightly sonically improved model.

This also leaves the S3/5se (based upon the original S3/5) ripe for upgrade (for the record, the S3/5se is basically the S3/5 with improved components, that some think is more 'upbeat' in the process).

Insightful sound

The Spendor S3/5R's target audience is not readily swayed by glib sales pitches; nor is the speaker intended for those who still scan the charts for the next Big Thing.