New Quad ESLs

Paul,

40w is more than enough to drive Quads, the difference between this and 80W is a massive 3db and at least the valve amp won't be struggling into the reactive load.

 

in one corner.....

Quad, manufacturers of the loudspeakers in question....

"the new II-forty offers all the subtlety and richness usually associated with the finest high-end vacuum tubes, but with enough power and speed to drive modern loudspeakers, especially those that present a difficult load."

In the other corner....

Paul. bloke.


Now I'm not a gambling man, but ding dong, seconds out round one...

 

Another myth.

Well, if you believe the post-Walker Quad marketing department then fair enough. And you forgot to mention that this was 'Quad, manufacturers of retro amps sold at very healthy profit margins' rather than 'Quad, manufacturers of state of the art loudspeakers'. You may have been a little confused.

Anyway I wouldn't want an amp with added 'richness and subtlety', I'd rather have the truth.

Paul

 

Not true, you have heard an audio research 45W integrated amp driving your quads to around 90db at the listening position without trouble as well.

 

Well spotted, I've adjusted the original post.

That may well be true, in the sense that it offers audibly different performance to the "classic", but that doesn't mean it is any better.

Quad have chosen to "resurrect" these amplifiers in response to market demand, and it has nothing to do with them being "good" amplifiers by modern engineering standards.

It is this kind of cynical manipulation:

that I was refering to in my earlier post.

The only good news in buying into this bankrupt philospohy is that there probably are audible differences to be "savoured" at every upgrade. It's like having a tone control you change every once in a while... ...only much more expensive.

 

no , I agree you're 100% right..

I've sold my valve amps on your reccomendation, and have bought the amazing Behringer EP1500.

This little beauty has vanishingly low levels of distortion, 1400w p/channel into 4 ohms, and wow just LOOK at the damping figures.

All that for just £175!

I bet they'll sound BRILLIANT in front of some quad electrostatics too. Let's all get one!

http://www.boomerangsounds.co.uk/product.php?xProd=344

 

I know you are being sarcastic, but the laughable thing is that what you are suggesting makes a great deal of engineering sense. If your interested in reducing the distortion of an audio system as a whole, then the biggest area for improvement is the speakers. So, put your money into the speakers and avoid unnecessarily expensive amplifiers.

Now, should you have the chance to listen to some ESL's driven by the Behringers, you may well not like the sound - but it's not because the Behringer/ESL combo is bad, it's because your frame of reference [ie. your current system] is wrong.

 

Forgot about that amp. The AR worked acceptably. It's an expensive solution though.

Paul

 

Oedipus, assuming you already had the best speakers you can find and still had money to spend on the system, would you still get a £200 or so amp to drive them?

Btw, I am using slightly modded (input buffer bypass, DC servo bypass) Alesis RA500's in my system and they sound fab regardless of the pocket-change money they cost. Anyone looking for a neutral amp with no obvious flaws would do well to hear the RA500. The power transformers don't have very tight manufacturing tolerance though as i had two that hummed a bit much and sent one back (I sit very close to them though).

 

That must have hurt Paul. I would have doubted the AR could have gone loud enough for you to have heard what it was doing anyway.

When I'm back, you must bring your uber amp over to my place and we'll try some blind tests on you.

 

I can answer that best by telling you what I am using Bryston PowerPak 120's (monoblocks), they are not cheap ($1200 each I think), they do come with a 20 year warranty though, have excellent Power cube measurements, and can be placed discretely behind the speakers they are driving (allowing the technically superior "long interconnects"/"short speaker cable" topology). These advantages seemed worth the extra.

They've driven several different speaker without overheating or throwing a fit.

I would be equally happy with the Alesis..

 

I have been recommending the Alesis RA series for quite some time. They do well on the null test, too (anybody remember those threads?).

 

Not really. It's possible to make good amps in many different forms.

Paul

 

Where do you get Emille amps from.... and how much do they cost? ta.

 

You can get them from me.

PM me

 

Mine is an earlier version which I picked up on ebay about three months ago. I understand the 'new' Emille amps are more up market although mine retailed at nearly two grand when new.

This is the first valve amp I have owned or heard for that matter. It certainly wasn't totally outclassed by my solid state Bryston pre and power amps.

Rod

 

Follow-up

Well, I had a good long demo on Saturday at Hifi Corner on Leith Walk. I spent about 2 hours listening to the 2805s, first with the 909 and then with the II-Forty, and then swapped in the 988s for a comparison. Sources were primarily the Quad CDP99 and a couple discs on a Funk V deck (w/ TechnoArm and Ortofon MC-1 Turbo).

Plugged into the 909, they had a lot of the qualities I remembered from my first dem, but with a certain everpresent hash in the top-end that wasn't obvious, but which made the end result fatiguing after a few discs, and failed to give instruments the individuality and life they deserved. Swapped in the II-Forties and all was sweet and delicious. What they have over my ATC 20s is this: a super-solid, super-stable soundstage, extreme resolution and inner detail, wonderful ambience retrieval, a silky smoothness across the whole frequency range, an incredible sense of coherence (which is saying something - the ATCs excel in this), a great sense of bounce and liveliness, and probably the best bass I've ever heard in my life - deep, dynamic, tight, clean, smooth, and totally unaffected by room resonances (hallelujah!).

But. By the end of the session I wasn't completely in love like I had been last weekend. I'm not sure what it is - can't quite put my finger on it. I wonder if perhaps the balance is just a little top-heavy - as if the designers tried just a bit too hard to compensate for previous Quad ESLs' lack of treble. Or maybe it was because large-scale orchestral crescendos didn't quite hold together as well as I'm used to with my ATCs, becoming a bit muddled and dynamically undifferentiated as the whole orchestra kicked in.

Or maybe it was because the balance overall seemed a tad grey, white-washed even, lacking a smidgen in tonal colour. The midband seemed to lack a touch of richness, exemplified by the 988s' much more vibrant and enjoyable Vivaldi performance (despite being otherwise inferior). (This latter impression may simply be a result of the slightly overexcited treble.)

But then again, perhaps the sources were simply outclassed by speakers and amplification? Perhaps a classier CD player would've done a better job of making me fall in love? I'll have to do another demo at some point, and bring along my DAX Decade...

I also have a suspicion that the slight underperformance in orchestral crescendos may have been due to the valve amp's lack of absolute grunt.

If it weren't for the slight lack of tonal richness, the slight bleaching, I would've bitten the bullet. But as it stands, I just couldn't justify the price.

I'll have to follow it up, and try out some different sources (and perhaps amps), but for now they're not for me. Kudos to Hifi Corner for taking care of me. The two chaps were very friendly, one of them actually very knowledgeable, and no sign of the dreaded pushiness - hooray!

After this dem, I went just down the road to Retro Reproduction for a dem of his 2nd hand 988s with some more upmarket upstream electronics. In this case, Graham (the shop's owner - a very decent chap) had just gotten in a big Boulder beast, and had it hooked up to the 988s out of curiosity. Upstream was an EAR 834L pre and a Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 3D CD player.

I quickly came to the some conclusion I had at Hifi Corner - the 988s aren't for me. The treble is simply too rolled off, the dynamics are too muted and flat, and the midrange is just a bit too warm and full-sounding. So, again out of curiosity, we swapped in a pair of the big Martin Logan SL3 hybrid electrostatics from about 10-15 years ago. These proved interesting.

They were so different from both the 2805s and the 988s! The first thing I noticed was an unpleasant upfront quality - an insistence, almost an edginess, in the upper frequencies. But I did also appreciate a beautifully-judged midband - somewhat between the 988s and 2805s, with the richness that violins deserve without the excessive fullness of the 988s.

I was also very impressed by the bass. I'd heard all the horror stories about hybrids (and MLs in particular) having disjointed, slow bass, but to me they sounded gorgeous. I'm sure the sheer grunt of the Boulder helped in this regard, and we had the bass control set to the -3dB setting, but the end result was extremely tight, deep, clean, fast, and powerful. They didn't have quite the same seamlessness, coherence or transparency in the bass as the 2805s - you could tell that it wasn't the stators producing the lowest frequencies - but the quality was still excellent.

They also have SCALE and mighty, mighty dynamics! I wouldn't be surprised if they could match ATC 50s in this regard. Orchestral crescendos didn't sound amiss with these babies (apart perhaps for that insistent, occasionally almost piercing, treble...)

But those upper frequencies kept me from loving them. So Graham swapped in an EAR V20 - a mid-power (30 watts?) valve integrated. Ahh, much better! The insistence was all but gone, replaced with a silky sweetness in the upper frequencies that was infinitely more enjoyable. But, as you might expect, the bass grip was gone too. What was there wasn't bad it was just very soft and woolly, and lacking quite a bit in extension. But the end result was much, much more listenable.

So, I like the Logans. They were also a real bargain, at $3500 new - a fair bit less second hand. So I'm pondering them. I could trade in my ATCs for them, for only a couple hundred on top. But I'm hesitant because of amps - I suspect finding the right amp to drive the Logans would be a bit of an odyssey (har!). I'd want the sweetness and openness of the V20, with the power and grip of the Boulder - without the cost of either! Doesn't sound possible. And I don't like the idea of searching for months (or years!) before I find a sound I'm happy with.

So I'm sticking with the ATCs for now, with an eye to getting my hands on a 2nd hand pair of Active 50s. But I'm keeping my eyes open for other potential suitors... The Scottish Hifi Show next weekend should be interesting.

Dunc

 

Only just read this, having returned from Sunday's visit to the Scottish HiFi Show. I listened to the ESL 2905s (the bigger brother) and looked at a single, unattached but quite attractive ESL 2805. I ws allowed to play a track from a CD I know well (female vocal - modern Fado) and it sounded open, good presence/soundstage and all the rest, but much more strident than I was used to. Then I discovered that although the amp was the Quad valve, the source was a Quad CDP - and it showed.

So, if you are planning to take your Dax Decade in, let me know.

 

I was totally baffled at how they managed to make these speakers spound so aggravatingly hard sounding at the show today.

Given the use of Quad II-40 and matching pre, and the CDP99 which has a rep for the opposite of hardness.... how come?

I used to own the Quad 988s and never thought I'd find a related speaker so grating.

 

The big Quads definitely didn't sound as good in that room as they had in the dealer last week. The bass for one was rather overblown. I didn't get the "aggravatingly hard" sound, but there was definitely an excess of treble and a bit of coldness. Less so with the record player, but still present.

I wonder if the coldness is perhaps endemic to the speakers. I remember thinking Vivaldi's violin concertos sounded quite a lot better on the 988s and the Logans than the Quads (when I had the shop demo last weekend), due to a lack of midrange warmth and naturalness - and listening to it on my home system last night, it sounded better than any of them! This lack of warmth/naturalness (or perhaps just excess treble?) was also present in the big GBP10K AudioPax speakers at the show - they were impressive with some things but couldn't play Vivaldi worth a damn!

Thinking ATC 50s for me then...

Dunc