ESS Performance Series LS-5 pic
American Audio Pro Audio vlp-300 Amplifier pic
Samsung HTTQ85 Digital Amplifier pic
ESS Loudspeakers Performance Series (Tempest) LS-5 pic
Vintage ESS Meets Samsung and Makes Home Theater S
Here is a story about bout combining vintage ESS Performance Series (Tempest) LS-5’s with contemporary components. I know it looks and sounds rudimentary, but this system does have amazing sound relative to room size (26ft x 13ft) and normal listening distances (13ft)… So below the 42” LCD Samsung HDTV and DirectTV DVR is the 1000 watt Samsung Home Theater System…Each “Tallboy” speaker (4) –front-left, right – rear-left, right- consists of two 2.5 inch mid-range drivers and one 1 inch tweeter. The Center Channel Speaker consists of two 2.5 inch mid-range drivers and one 1 inch tweeter as well and then of course there’s the 8 in bass reflex passive subwoofer. On the left side of my HTS is a 150 watt RMS (times two channels) American Audio Pro Audio power amp that drives the two ESS Performance Series (Tempest) LS-5’s that you see to the inside of the left and right “Tallboy” speakers… So you wonder how I have included these vintage hallmarks of sound reproduction and clarity? This is how I meshed the American Audio power amp to the HTS (Home Theater System): Since there was not a “volume relative” audio line output on the back of the HTS, I took a 5 foot instrument cable (TRS) and cut one end off- - stripped the insulation from the copper and placed the leads into the “subwoofer out” on the HTS - - on the other end of the instrument cable ( ¼” male) I put on a ¼” to ¼” female coupler - - from the coupler I put on a ¼” male to two ¼” male (splitter) and then from those, into each channel input on the back of the power amp… There, now I had both channel power level LED’s flashing away and therefore it looks like I have low, low bass operating in stereo right! Ya, It just looks that way…everyone knows bass is a mono sound reproduction…The original subwoofer that came with my HTS sounded just fine, it really did, for normal listening conditions….you know, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and all that jazz. But I needed low, cinema, chest pounding bass…I’m talking about 23hz low, and at low power consumption better yet thanks to the 10 inch passive radiators firing into the wall from the ESS cabinets…I never knew how much low end frequency was in the Jeopardy theme song…Wow! As for my original HTS subwoofer, it’s still hooked up serving as my mid-bass/low vocal range driver in which my dual 10in ESS’s can’t reproduce effectively if you know what I mean…As for the ESS Heil Tweeters, they are “non-existent” thanks to the internal crossover in my HTS and and switchable crossover on the back of the power amp and that’s exactly what I wanted to use my ESS loudspeakers for-dual bass cabinets…all of my other speakers are sonically correct so I don’t need anything more out of my ESS’s in the midrange and highrange spectrum… As for cosmetics of the system as a whole, I lucked out…I was forced to spray my cabinets semi-flat black because the sticky-back faux wood grain tore away long ago, the grille cloth had many holes so I reupholstered the grille frames with thin black cloth…So those visually match the system more so than before. As for the add-on power amp, It’s black and has blue LED function lights just as my Samsung HTS component does. Now I know I don’t have the words Klipch, Crown, Crest or Denon throughout my story but that doesn’t mean a combination of Vintage ESS and Samsung can’t sound good either! I made it!! Thank you for your interest in Vintage ESS Pro Audio…and let me know if you would like to see more specific pictures of the system. --dave |
