Legacy Audio Whisper Clarity Edition Loudspeaker Review

The furtive AMT

When I had dropped off my speakers for the retrofit I had seen the new driver set, the AMT, but honored Bill’s request for confidentiality about it. The twin Air Motion Tweeter set patterned after the Heil tweeter would be a big deal. Little did I know my speakers would be the first to be fitted with the final version! Bill also suggested a proper capacitor upgrade, cleverly proposing Clarity Caps (no affiliation with Clarity Cable)! It was coming together like a good dream; 10Ga Clarity Cable to all drivers, the Clarity Caps and the sweet Air Motion Tweeters. This would not just be a tweak, but a radical redesign! Indeed, this redesigned Clarity Whisper stands alongside the Focus SE and Aeris in the pantheon of the Masters Series, products of the highest expression of design and build quality from Legacy Audio.

In other words, my anticipated comparison between the pre-Clarity wired speaker and the post-Clarity speaker is now invalid. Much more has been done to the speaker than simply upgrading the wiring. Thus, I can only speak tangentially about the improvement of the internal wiring. As important as it is to conduct apples to apples comparisons in reviews, I was not going to forego the potential afforded by Clarity Caps and the AMT drivers if the speakers were already at Legacy’s factory.

How far can speaker design be taken?

The Legacy Audio Whisper was an already impressive speaker when I first laid hands on it. Bill Dudleston has a well-earned reputation among recording studios and knows how to make an exciting, involving speaker. Over the past five years, Legacy has exploded in popularity as it has brought out new models. When I first reviewed it I pronounced the Whisper a product which performed well above its price point, touching state-of-the-art performance. In the past few years the rest of the audiophile community is learning what I had discovered; Legacy Audio is a new force to be reckoned with in High-End speakers!

Being a hybrid, the Whisper is subject to the particular idiosyncrasies of differing technologies. For instance, mating a planar driver with a dynamic driver shows them to be dramatically different in terms of wave propagation. Anyone who owns panel speakers as well as dynamic speakers has heard how distinctly these two technologies get the job done. In addition, line arrays carry their own characteristics, among them the potential problem of comb filtering as multiple sets of identical waves interact. For that reason some listeners adore single driver speakers, even though they may have severe lower frequency limitations, because they hear “coherence,” meaning the sound is emanating from a pair of speakers with single drivers.

While the Whisper minimizes such issues the Clarity Edition goes a long way toward entirely resolving them. Comparatively, I sense much less of a “gap” between driver sets now, and the technologies seem to merge more gracefully. I have been spending a lot of time over the past year with the King Sound King full range ESL, and the perception I get when listening to the Whisper is that of a localized panel with its wave launch emanating from a region about 3 feet to 5 feet off the ground. Especially tightened up is the performance of acoustic instruments such as piano and upright bass. In this regard the Whisper has become more like an ESL with a listening window for the Midrange on up, but with no less striking clarity.

Bass extension was also a compromise in the previous versions of the Whisper although it incorporates four 15-inch open baffle drivers set in coupled pairs. Prior to the internal upgrade it had excellent bass definition, but due to the open baffles less dynamic impact than might be anticipated. Part of that shyness of impact compared to 15-inch subwoofers like the XTREME HD has been addressed by the improved cabling and capacitors. Bill seemed surprised by the degree of improvement in the bass, as the speaker now can supply respectable subwoofer-like LF on its own without subs. This is not to say that the Whisper XD is not aided by the subs, but I no longer deem them necessary to produce gratifying, bone rattling bass. Had I this version of the Whisper from the onset I may have eschewed adding subwoofers.

The most telling evidence of this came as I played Bass Addiction, my go-to extreme LF music. In the past, the Whisper, which has a specified lower end of 22 Hz +/-3 dB, all but dropped the lowest notes; but after the Clarity Upgrade the impact was sufficient enough to rattle my basement room’s drop ceiling tiles! No other speaker I have used, regardless of size and driver configuration apart from the Legacy Helix, has been able to do that!