Gear-Lust: The Quad ESL
Psst ...
I have a problem. I suffer from a condition called audiophilia nervosa which has me checking out various and assorted gear, and dreaming. As an engineer, though, it just can't be "pretty" it has to be technologically interesting in some way to catch my eye. It also has to be unusual in some way. My budget rarely allows me to indulge in them, but I end up annoying people around me playing "what if"
Kathy tells me this is 100% accurate - because she regularly gets annoyed by this. And she is refusing to a comment directly since it just might feed this a bit too much.
So, here goes with one that has piqued my interest:
The Quad ESL
The Quad ESL was the first electrostatic speaker commercially produced (the technology was a lab curiosity since about 1930). Read about the general principles here, and about the ESL itself here.
Released in 1957, it was a mono speaker made for the mono era. It was difficult to drive with conventional amplifiers, had initial quality problems that were annoying by 1950's standard, horrifying by current expectations. No protection circuitry so that if you drove it with more than 33V - it would arc (Not an issue in the 1950's where 25W was considered high power but a real issue shortly thereafter). Ouch. A few years later, when stereo was introduced, their width was a liability. Since one is about 34" wide, imagine what that does to a living room when you need two. And, due to the construction of the panels, the spot where you would get the full stereophonic impact was small - only big enough for one person to sit.
Sounds pretty bad, huh? Why on Earth would you or anyone ever buy them? For the same reason people put up with quirky unreliable Italian and British sports cars of the same era: there was nothing else that came close to the detail and sonic reproduction they offered. Nothing.
Giving the booming restoration, reconstruction and new production business surrounding them today - some feel you can't do better even today. I had heard comments like "after hearing them, I wondered just how much progress we have actually made in the last 55 years really."
Production was from 1957 - 1996 (39 years!) where they fixed and tweaked it into a somewhat reliable product (protection circuitry, improvements in panel manufacturing, fit and finish).
In any regular consumer market a product approaching a half decade of age would be considered old or to use a cliché: long in the tooth. But the Quad ESL had 2 things going for it: It's British owners who were more inclined to develop new amplifiers and milk the speaker as a cash cow, and people felt it really was that good.
I suppose that increasing competition seems to have lit a fire under the owner of Quad whose cash cow was likely to go away - and released the "ESL63" so named because he had been playing around with the successor to the ESL starting in 1963. He released this speaker in 1981, and has been the basis of all that followed. It fixed a number of issues that were ignorable in the 1950's but less so then: The sweet spot was larger (the panels made to mimic a point source), went louder, and higher in the treble and lower in the bass, and had better protection circuits so a modern amp had little danger of doing lasting harm to the speakers. And it is interesting to note, that a Quad electrostatic speaker made today, through several owners, is more or less the same speaker made in 1981 - out with the old cash cow, in with the new!
Still the original ESL is a very interesting beast and one I would love to take for a test drive!
I have a problem. I suffer from a condition called audiophilia nervosa which has me checking out various and assorted gear, and dreaming. As an engineer, though, it just can't be "pretty" it has to be technologically interesting in some way to catch my eye. It also has to be unusual in some way. My budget rarely allows me to indulge in them, but I end up annoying people around me playing "what if"
Kathy tells me this is 100% accurate - because she regularly gets annoyed by this. And she is refusing to a comment directly since it just might feed this a bit too much.
So, here goes with one that has piqued my interest:
The Quad ESL
Released in 1957, it was a mono speaker made for the mono era. It was difficult to drive with conventional amplifiers, had initial quality problems that were annoying by 1950's standard, horrifying by current expectations. No protection circuitry so that if you drove it with more than 33V - it would arc (Not an issue in the 1950's where 25W was considered high power but a real issue shortly thereafter). Ouch. A few years later, when stereo was introduced, their width was a liability. Since one is about 34" wide, imagine what that does to a living room when you need two. And, due to the construction of the panels, the spot where you would get the full stereophonic impact was small - only big enough for one person to sit.
Sounds pretty bad, huh? Why on Earth would you or anyone ever buy them? For the same reason people put up with quirky unreliable Italian and British sports cars of the same era: there was nothing else that came close to the detail and sonic reproduction they offered. Nothing.
Giving the booming restoration, reconstruction and new production business surrounding them today - some feel you can't do better even today. I had heard comments like "after hearing them, I wondered just how much progress we have actually made in the last 55 years really."
Production was from 1957 - 1996 (39 years!) where they fixed and tweaked it into a somewhat reliable product (protection circuitry, improvements in panel manufacturing, fit and finish).
In any regular consumer market a product approaching a half decade of age would be considered old or to use a cliché: long in the tooth. But the Quad ESL had 2 things going for it: It's British owners who were more inclined to develop new amplifiers and milk the speaker as a cash cow, and people felt it really was that good.
I suppose that increasing competition seems to have lit a fire under the owner of Quad whose cash cow was likely to go away - and released the "ESL63" so named because he had been playing around with the successor to the ESL starting in 1963. He released this speaker in 1981, and has been the basis of all that followed. It fixed a number of issues that were ignorable in the 1950's but less so then: The sweet spot was larger (the panels made to mimic a point source), went louder, and higher in the treble and lower in the bass, and had better protection circuits so a modern amp had little danger of doing lasting harm to the speakers. And it is interesting to note, that a Quad electrostatic speaker made today, through several owners, is more or less the same speaker made in 1981 - out with the old cash cow, in with the new!
Still the original ESL is a very interesting beast and one I would love to take for a test drive!
Comments
Post a Comment