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I have been chatting with Steven from One Thing Audio in the UK. I have an order for his one thing widget in the post which will allow me to use the quads with any amp.
He is also an advocate of using high power amps with the quads , eg 100 watts, to bring out the best in the speaker, but obviously with clamp boards.
I am not going to plunge into it, but it is an interesting idea.
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My experience is that 100wpc+ amps can go unstable on 57's. So it's two issues, 'can it damage the speaker' and 'can it damage the amp'.
With the clamping board your speakers are protected from a higher-powered but stable amp.
But if the amp goes unstable, all bets are off.
The only 100wpc amp I've used that was very stable on my 57's was the Rogue Sphinx.
I like stable 50wpc amps on my 57's. I'm using a Croft amp now, it's an excellent match.
"The problem with quotes from the internet is that many of them just are just made up."
-Abraham Lincoln
With the protection clamp board in place the speaker won't care if the amp is stable with the load or not. The amp will not damage the speaker. The circuit is a simple voltage regulator that is in parallel with the secondary windings. Once a certain voltage threshold is reached the regulator engages and prevents any further voltage swing.
An amp that cannot handle the load is not much of an amp IMO. This may sound rough but having used the Quad for 30+ years I have yet to find an amp that is not stable with the speaker and this includes a little NAD 7020 receiver. I have even stacked Quads with the NAD and it just keeps on singing!
And yes I think the speakers sound MUCH better with large output amps. Folks are amazed with the dynamics and bass capabilities with large output amps. Smaller amps just never give the grip and control that I like. Something in the 50-100 watt range will work but I know plenty of folks that use even larger amps. I am have no fears of damage using 300 watts.
The NAD 7020 is 20wpc.
I put a Belles 100wpc amp on my Quad's and it started making very bad noises.
"The problem with quotes from the internet is that many of them just are just made up."
-Abraham Lincoln
Yes the NAD 7020 is a mere 20 watts. Certainly not the last word in amplification for any speaker but it does an amazing job with Quads.
Sorry to hear about the Belles. Probably time to set it at the curb, i.e. Agon! Just poking a bit of fun but seriously a properly designed amp should be unconditionally stable into any load IMO at least within its impedance/load rating. There might be a few exceptions to that rule, the original Apogee as an example, but I would not consider the Quad, any of them, to be amp killers.
The Belles was a fabulous amp on a regular dynamic speaker (I had PMC's at the time).
I thought the 57 had an impedance varying by frequency from 2 to 32 ohms and a lot of amps (especially high-powered amps) just freaked out at that load.
There is an amp made in Switzerland called the 'Job 225'. It's getting all sorts of buzz for being a $1699 giant killer. (Apparently it's basically a Goldmund amp in cheap threads). I'd try one but am unsure about how it does on low impedance loads. I asked them, they said they'd only tested it to four ohms.
"The problem with quotes from the internet is that many of them just are just made up."
-Abraham Lincoln
I have Quad ESL-57's with Wayne Piquet- rebuilt tweeter panels, HT diode ladders and zener clamp boards.
I have found that using many different amps rated up to around 30~40 watts is somewhat unsatisfactory. The bass just isn't solid. Using a Harman-Kardon Citation II (60 w/ch) or Forte 4a (50 w/ch) is JUST RIGHT in my situation. Solid sound. Using amps rated MORE than 50~60 watts per channel*, I have not heard improvement over the 50~60 watt amps. Wayne Picquet uses a NAD amp of about 100 watts per side, if I recall correctly.
It's funny that a 30 watt/ch amp didn't quite "do it" but a 50-watt amp did - the difference is only about 2 dB. But that's what I observed.
*Biggest amp I tried on the ESL-57's was a NAD 2600, which I measured putting out 200 watts into an 8 ohm dummy load, with 6 dB headroom (!)
I never had any amp become unstable when driving the Quads, even an old Marantz 240 that I tried.
The Soraya (100w into 8 ohms), the NAKSA 80 (80w), the NAKSA 100 (100w) and the new NAKSA 125 (125w).
Fine sounding amps, too (I've been using AKSA amps for nearly 15 years and have recently upgraded 2 of my amps to NAKSA 80s ... I run 3-way active on my Maggies).
Regards,
Andy
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