Double delight: 2022 Golden Ear Awards go to both Graham Audio LS8/1 and LS5/5 monitors

“If I were absolutely forced to choose one loudspeaker for the rest of my life, the LS8/1 would be on the short list,” Paul Seydor TAS 9/22.

“What I can say for now is that I consider it [the LS5/5] the finest three-way cone-based loudspeaker in my experience and one of the finest, period … but such is its ability to engage that my sense of involvement was consistently complete so that I rarely wanted to stop listening. Digging out recording after recording, especially long cherished favorites, just to hear how beautiful they can sound when they are beautifully recorded and faithfully reproduced. And my goodness, these speakers certainly get my toes tapping on anything that’s designed to do that, making it hard for me to sit still during the accelerating virtuoso climax in the morning raga in Ali Akbar Khan’s Morning and Evening Ragas (Connoisseur Society, vintage vinyl) and impossible to prevent me grabbing my baton to conduct my favorite recordings of the Rite of Spring. I was happy to luxuriate, indeed wallow in the sinfully rich sonorities of Strauss’ Don Quixote in the Levine/MET orchestra recording (DG CD), the glorious opulence of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty (Dorati, Concertgebuow, Phillips CD) or the sizzling writers of brass, swing and drive in Bill Berry’s For Duke (M&K Realtime direct-to-disc) … This loudspeaker belongs to a tiny group of my own personal “elite” that I could happily live with the remainder of my days, confident that I would hear every source reproduced to an extremely high level of fidelity indeed,” Paul Seydor, TAS 9/22.