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One day my whole family was taking a road trip to New York. For a week I had the house to myself and decided to experiment. Out went the Calliopes, in came the Rogers LS 3/5a speakers and their AB1 passive bass extenders. Now what kind of crazy was it to pair one of the most inefficient speakers ever made (82dB/m on a good day with the wind in their back) with a triode amplifier of a mere 22 watts?

Not so crazy after all when you know that although of very low sensitivity, those speakers are of very high impedance throughout the range to need hardly any current to sing; and that towards their latter years Rogers actually designed a little tube amplifier to go with them that delivered 20 watts. This formally acknowledged that the 3/5a did better with low damping factors and low current amplifiers and that tube sweetness had a natural way of taming their upper midrange perkiness. Guess what? The Rogers LS 3/5a and Trafomatic SM-300B were a marriage made in heaven. I have owned those speakers for 22 long years. This was the very best they ever sounded. Now the next thing is going to sound like a criticism but isn't meant that way by any stretch. Why the association worked so well is because the Rogers masked the SM-300B's weaknesses by being themselves even more limited in the very same areas whilst fully magnifying the amp's strong qualities. This was just the opposite of trying to pair components that offset each other's weaknesses. Here it was all about embracing one aesthetic and pushing it to its extreme.


The Rogers are limited at both extremes even with their optional bass units. They don't have great dynamics. They certainly don't thrive on sharp transients. They favour the midrange with a huge soundstage and keen magnification of voices. And doesn't that sound familiar? It's exactly what I already wrote about the Trafomatic. The Rogers certainly benefited from an amplifier with a gentle touch and no harshness in the midrange. Within minutes of putting the system together I knew I was in for a night at the opera. There would be no other choice.


I started with Vivaldi's Ercole whose reconstruction by Fabio Biondi creates somewhat of a chimera of an opera. As much material is actually from Biondi as Vivaldi yet the Italian conductor worked with such talent and restraint that unless you compare scores, it's impossible to tell who is who. Villazon in the title role may not have regained all of his splendor but certainly has no problem singing through the bravura arias Biondi throws at him, even his last one which Vivaldi wrote strategically to showcase the full range of a tenor and the strength of Ercole. I was waiting for this aria which I knew can at times stress out the Rogers' upper midrange. Not now. The Trafomatic allowed the voice to soar without restriction but never pushed the Rogers close to their distortion point which duly happened on the same track with Finale's F-7591 power amplifier on loan.


Dame Joyce DiDonato sings the female lead and is absolutely effortless. This repertoire has become so natural to her that I don't think even Vivaldi could throw anything at her which she wouldn't handle with the utmost elegance. I mentioned earlier that the SM-300B had a tendency to embellish mezzo soprano voices. So do the Rogers. The combination of the two resulted in a huge DiDonato in my room, her size certainly not in proportion or close to reality. Yet the intensity of her singing under such a magnifying glass was thrilling so to heck with objectivism!


Still intending to test what I knew to be the Rogers' greatest challenge—the transition between upper midrange to lower treble designed for live radio broadcast monitoring to allow engineers to detect unpleasant distortions—I called on two Händel favorites. The first was Xavier Sabata's Bad Guys, a compilation of countertenor arias sung by the villains in Händel's operas. The second was Magdalena Kozena's Ah mio Cor, a compilation of what could be described as Händel's arias for the good guys. This was an interesting comparison. It shows that Händel treated good and bad guy arias with the same depth and complexity without segregation but that the treatment by a male and female singer is extremely different in the end. A male counter tenor rarely develops the same ornamentation and upper reach as a mezzo but a female is rarely capable of portraying the power and aura of a military leader (which more often than not Händel's heros were).


Xavier Sabata is a rich elegant countertenor who makes those enraged arias sound easy and never grating. Kozena is in another league and why I wrote that female singers rarely embody the power needed to fully inhabit their male hero figures. She is one of the few capable of both the volume and physical projection necessary to suspend disbelief. There truly is a young man standing in front of us, albeit one who bypassed puberty altogether. This level of power in the upper midrange should have sent the Rogers into distress but even lively levels raised no major distortion. There was merely a little hardening but nothing you'd not expect from far less demanding speakers. I had testimony to the SM-300B's superb midrange and very gentle drive of these speakers: strong enough to exploit their full macrodynamic abilities (not amongst the best in general but the Trafomatic maxed them out) whilst being light-handed enough to let woofer and tweeter breathe without stress.


As indicated earlier, the night went on very late and finished with Rene Jacobs' lively and technically outstanding recording of Mozart's La Finta Giardiniera, incidentally the very first opera I ever went to in concert when I was twelve. The orchestra and soloists in this 24/96kHz recording downloaded from Qobuz are superbly captured and the scene spreads across the whole listening room, behind and completely disconnects from the speakers which absolutely disappeared. The technical quality achieved is probably more meaningful in this version than with Mozart's original score which was extremely light and austere. Jacobs chose to record a posthumous re-orchestration with fully developed wind and percussion sections whilst shortening recitatives and introductions to enhance the dynamics of the on-stage action.