When Frank Alles of Stereo Times played "Cell Block Tango" from the Chicago soundtrack on a pair of Legacy Focus SE towers, he thought "the bass impact was going to break my house." Legacy's big towers pair deep, powerful bass with an unusual tweeter, the Air Motion Transformer, invented by Oskar Heil. Its thin film is pleated like the bellows of an accordion, and as the folds squeeze together and open they push air out about five times faster than the film itself moves. Jim Clements of Secrets heard "a clean, airy sound" from these tweeters in the Legacy Aeris. Alles found that the Focus SE compresses the sound much less than most speakers as the music gets louder. Legacy suits listeners with larger rooms who want full-range sound from one pair of towers.

The Focus SE is the model to start with, and it's easy to drive. Alles ran his volume control a few notches lower than with his previous speakers, and he would not hesitate to use a good 40 to 50 watt tube amp. He preferred a Rogue Audio Medusa hybrid to a Benchmark AHB2 solid-state amp as a match for what he calls the speaker's "bold and slightly forward character." Give the Focus space. Alles ended up with the speakers well out from the front wall, about 7 feet apart and toed in moderately. Two switches on the back trim the treble and the mid-bass, and Legacy's Bill Dudleston told Alles he has seen dozens of owners get very good results in rooms of about 12 by 16 feet. For a medium-size room, Alles points to the Signature SE, a scaled-down Focus. The Aeris goes further and brings its own bass power, with two subwoofers in each cabinet, each driven by its own amplifier.

Dudleston's interest began with a radio he built as a kid. In 1983, as the owner of Reel to Real Designs, he introduced a line of speakers sold factory-direct, with the Legacy-1 as its flagship, Audio magazine reported. By 1998 the line had grown to 12 speakers, including the Focus, and the Classic was the most popular. Recording engineer Tom Jung played his new jazz CDs on a pair of Classics and put them in good company with Thiels and B&Ws. The mastering engineer Steve Hoffman has used Legacy speakers on reissues of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and the Springfield listening room is hung with framed albums made by engineers who used Legacy speakers, among them the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over. Clements measured one of the Aeris's built-in subwoofers and got the best low-bass reading of any full-range speaker he had tested. Anthony Cordesman of The Absolute Sound uses the Aeris as one of his references. In the season 1 finale of HBO's The Penguin, Colin Farrell's character dances to music played on Aeris XD speakers.