Looking For a Digital Coaxial and have ££ ?

bastards, after all that bitching - you gonna become best friends!

 

Paul, I thought it might be worthwhile revisiting this as HFN tested a second pair of 2905 this month as part of a complete Quad system (Don't forget the car keys as you run out the house on the way to the newsagents)

Again they tested them and the results were indeed different - here is the text.

Now to put the magical midrange into perspective, the measurements show 75db at 800hz, 84db at 1khz, 79db at 2khz finally rising to 85db at 5khz. Frankly, considering some loudspeakers I hear offer similar distortion figures and are +/- 1db across the same frequency range, I am shocked at how poor this second set of measurements are.

 

I reckon original ESL63s would be better.

It's the rubbish pair matching that is the giveaway that Quad have forgotten how to make the core elements.

(I can walk to a newsagent, but I probably won't...)

Paul

 

Sad but probably true. Although the only decent set of measurements of a '63 were IIRC taken twenty foor up a pole of something - hardly indicative of their domestic performance.

 

But indicative of their anechoic performance, which seems like a good place to start. And could sanity check the computed in room stuff.

Paul

 

Surely the in room response is what 99.9% of Quad owners will actually experience? Or a varient of.

 

The in room responses are surely all variants of the anechoic. Which can be directly measured with the help of simple low tech equipment such as a barge pole. Or inferred with signal processing.

One of the service tests of an ESL63 is to compare the speaker side by side with a 'known good' sample. They are supposed to sound the same. I think a 3dB sample-sample variation would be obvious. The standard isn't pair matching but absolute performance.

Paul

 

SO would you like to add the words "old" and "discontinued" to the below?

It seems pretty conclusive that three pairs of modern Quads have now been measured by two seperate magazines and produced frankly appalling measurements.

Of course if you powered them with a high output impedence valve amp, there's always the chance that the roller coaster FR's might match up

 

I can't say too much because some of it is anecdotal, but there are some serious problems with the manufacture of the electrostats.

One person on the Quad group has had 3 pairs now, all of which have been badly matched and broken after a short time, and there other tales.

It does make me sad as the 57 and 63 showed what could be done and one would have thought that with modern technology they would become superb speakers.

 

Its nice to hear of some objective reasons why I thought the new ESL range didn't sound as good as the previous generation. Given the many positive comments from other people I thought I was just going mad!