Living Voice Auditorium R25A Anniversary Loudspeakers Pair [ex-demo]

“With Living Voice I completely reach my maturity after years of research and listenings. It's a magic design.” 

Gerardo Ventura, Playstereo, 2017

“It no longer really makes sense to talk about the sound itself but rather how absolutely wonderful the music becomes.  I’ve never had such a completely revelatory and unexpected experience in my home audio life.”

“I felt it was extraordinary to listen to music in this way and come away in awe at the sheer emotional and connective power these speakers possess.”

6Moons, Edward Barker, OBX-RW

“What is most alluring about these speakers is that they bring out so much in your record collection - great music becomes fantastic, addictive and totally engrossing.”

Jason Kennedy, HiFi Choice, UK

Living Voice Auditorium R25A 25th Anniversary.

To mark 25 years since the launch of our original Auditorium loudspeaker, we’ve created the R25 Anniversary model.

Superficially identical to earlier generations, but fundamentally a different design, this is in all respects the most advanced Auditorium yet.

A distillation of everything we’ve learned in three decades, the R25A has a vivid ‘see-through’ presentation, a coherence and freedom that lends fresh insight into all music genres.

An Auspicious Debut For The R25A.

The official launch of the R25A was at the Munich High End Show 2019. A number of listeners were more than a little taken aback by the energy and performance levels achieved by this relatively unobtrusive, apparently simple speaker system.

Design Rationale: Auditorium Series.

The Auditorium R25A is the base model in the Auditorium Series followed by the Avatar 3, IBX-R3, IBX-RW3 and OBX-RW3.

All share our favoured MTM (mid, treble, mid) driver configuration, which offers performance advantages over both a simple 2-way design and the more complex but less elegant 3-way option. The MTM topology possesses a more symmetrical polar and more even power response, as well as superior phase characteristics. Factor in higher sensitivity and lower intermodulation distortion and you have an elegant solution even before you design the crossover – a true Occam’s Razor approach. Presenting an easy load and a genuine 94dB sensitivity, each Auditorium model allows class A valve electronics to shine, bringing music to life with verve and vitality.

The elegantly proportioned cabinets and small footprint of the Auditorium Series conceal a meticulous, obsessive approach to the complex problems of loudspeaker design. The Auditorium’s unobstructive natural qualities cut straight to the heart of the musical performance. There is a common DNA from the Avatar R3 up with degrees of refinement, precision of component tolerancing, and overall component quality increasing significantly as you ascend through the range.

In 30 years of loudspeaker development, Living Voice has evolved to the point where around 90% of our crossover components are proprietary. Should we fail to find components that exactly meet our needs, we design in-house and have them engineered to meet our specific objectives – these include film & foil capacitors, non-inductive wire-wound resistors and precision air-core inductors. In this way we can temper the ‘voicing’ to meet our critical musical standards. Most recently, we have developed our own HF unit in conjunction with Scanspeak, a driver which preserves the elegance and filigree of the renowned Revelator but relieves it of a broad energy dip between 10kHz and 15 kHz.

Two 6.5” bass-mid drive units (again a proprietary design made for us by Scanspeak) are used in parallel to produce the equivalent surface area to a single 10” driver – but with half of the excursion and 50% lower intermodulation distortion. Our driver can work cleanly above crossover, facilitating seamless integration with the HF system without the need for steep electrical filter slopes or the use of notch filtering to counteract stop-band break-up modes.

Each Auditorium is ideally suited to exploiting the inherent advantages of class A valve amplification, and has been designed and voiced with the output impedance (and damping factor) of zero/low negative feedback direct-heated Triode designs in mind. In smaller rooms, the 8 watts offered by a single-ended 300B design can be fully realised, however we recommend the use of amplifiers with 15 watts or more to exploit the full dynamic potential available on a broad range of music programme. The dispersion characteristics of the Auditorium Series are such that they create a coherent soundstage even for listeners sitting significantly off-axis. This is emphatically not a ‘hot spot’ design.

Development Process – The Human Factor.

As someone once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” It’s a maxim worth repeating in loudspeaker design.

No component is truly benign and there is always a hint of added character, colour or texture which influences the sound. We have literally hundreds of components of different technologies in our R&D library which we can refer to when we are voicing our designs. Finely-honed subjective management of these unmeasurable, unquantifiable characteristics is as important as the strict science of precision crossover filter design. Our crossover designs are the product of three decades of evolution; the goal is the seamless integration of cabinet and drive units to produce an organic ‘out of the box’ listening experience.

We develop all Living Voice loudspeakers using demanding broad spectrum complex musical programmes, with the emphasis being on holistic musical expression, communication, and balance – of creating the illusion of real human beings performing with passion and purpose.

Technical Specifications & Measurements.

Basic performance specifications for the Auditorium models are listed below.

R25 Anniversary

Color accuracy

NB. Veneer representations on-screen should not be considered 100% accurate – there will inevitably be variations in colour due to your monitor settings and of course natural variations in colour and grain in the veneers themselves. We occasionally produce a number of cabinets in a ‘one-off’ finish such as Zebrawood – please ask for details of any currently available options.

Auditorium Series

It's important to anyone with a passion for music that their hi-fi system has a natural tonal balance and more importantly an even and consistent dynamic balance. Many people, and technophiles in particular, believe that this balance can be achieved through objective quantitative analysis. 

At Living Voice we have a different outlook. We develop our products using our musical sensibility, and we measure our progress against the artistic expression and emotional communication that we are able to realise in recordings of significant musical performances.

The Auditorium Series consists of 4 models with the option of inboard (IBX) or outboard (OBX) crossover electronics on the two top models.

Living Voice products

At the high-end of audio design, art and science merge. The most revered audio designers are no longer strictly concerned with the objective world of measurements and specifications. Instead they explore the world of human expression and human sentiment as captured in the recorded musical performance. This is an exploration guided not by machines and technology, but by tacit knowledge, intuition and musical sensibility.

There is a vast legacy of music captured on recordings dating back to the beginning of the last century. These recordings allow us to see into the times and the minds of the music’s composers and performers with a remarkable sensitivity and clarity. Music conveys the subtlety and fathomless depths of human experience and is one of our most profound and affecting art forms.

All Living Voice products reflect our desire to provide the committed music enthusiast with a coherent, artistically convincing and emotionally engaging experience.

This approach originally led us to develop the Auditorium loudspeaker design. It remains the case today — if we can’t find a product we consider resolves a particular issue to the performance level we aspire to, then we’ll examine the possibilities of creating it ourselves. This is rarely driven primarily by cost or marketing considerations in the conventional sense. We prefer to think of it as a refusal to compromise (or enthusiastic bloody-mindedness, if you prefer).

Living Voice

Living Voice was established in 1991 and is based in Derbyshire, England.

You can find out more about us by clicking on the "Designer" tab at the beginning of this product page.