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In Reply to: RE: Stereophile Reaches a New Nadir posted by Charles Hansen on October 30, 2017 at 22:38:53
>>I don't believe is system matching. If something is good, it's good. If it only sounds good under certain conditions, it is not good - it is incorrect.<< _ C HansenI'm of this school too and will add, toy amps designed to drive only 8/4 ohm loads and cost the same as a Hyundai should be roasted at Burning man.
Speakers : Richard Vandersteen is rated and not Peter walker ....! That's crazy Charles ...
Regards
Edits: 10/31/17Follow Ups:
> > Richard Vandersteen is rated and not Peter walker ....! That's crazy Charles < <
Obviously any list is going to be incomplete and imperfect. I included Richard Vandersteen as I live in the US. He has sold hundreds of thousands of pairs of speakers, has a distinct design philosophy and each of his dozen or so products keeps getting better. I don't think he influenced that many other designers, but one thing he did was figure out a way to make a really ugly complex compound enclosure look good by hiding it all behind grill cloth - a few companies copied that idea.
Walker probably sold a huge number of his ESLs in England, but they are fairly rare in the States. He only made two models. Both of them were basically "best of" collages of other's ideas, and he admitted as much. Most of his "genius" was simply in inventing production methods. However so much hand labor was involved that after his death the tooling (if I recall correctly) was sold to a German company that couldn't make a profitable operation of it as there was so much labor involved. Finally it was sold to a company that builds them in China, where skilled hand labor is fairly common and ridiculously cheap. They raised the prices significantly, and keep introducing new models that are just variants of the '63. I don't know of any other ESL designers that were influenced by Walker - they mostly went back to the original sources that he used.
It's just a post in an online forum. I wouldn't take it too seriously.
tooling (if I recall correctly) was sold to a German company that couldn't make a profitable operation of it as there was so much labor involved.
The Braun LE-1 .
I was thinking of some place (a dealer or a big fan) that bought the tooling and the diaphragms had to be tensioned with dozens of weights tied to strings while they applied the glue. After dozens of years, the tooling was covered in glue drips.
Thanks for the interesting insight with the Braun. I'm sure that the Germans could have easily imported the actual Quads but felt that their version was superior - likely more reliable.
Hardly. Won't go into the details.
The original Quad was reliable as long as one read the Owner's Manual and followed the instructions. Of course who needs to read an Owner's Manual?
It would be a similar situation if say someone had one of your amps decided to take a screw driver across the output terminals at full output blow it up and then scream the stuff is not reliable. Such was the case with the original Quad. Do things to them that the Owner's Manual clearly stated not to do and yes you are going to blow them up. Nothing wrong with the design or speakers just stupid users.
Tens-of-thousands of Quads here in the States. Just a guess but I would imagine there are as many Quads in the US as in the UK. Close anyway. Rare they are not! Well over 100,000 units produced.
The 63 speaker was heavily influenced by several other's ideas none of which made it to market. The original Quad was revolutionary in every sense of the word. The world had never seen a true full-range production electrostat prior to the original Quad. A few interesting lab experiments, Janszen's tweeter was around but that was about it.
Stax was heavily influenced by Walker's work. In many ways their speakers were a copy of the original Quad. Naim developed a speaker that was never produced but was essentially a copy of the original Quad. Walker inspired a whole generation of engineers if for no other reason he demonstrated the full-range production electrostat was feasible.
'Most of his "genius" was simply in inventing production methods'
I would say it was a bit more than that but even if that was the extent of his talents that alone makes him a genius. It doesn't matter how great the idea if we can't build it, profitably, consistently, reliably then we don't have much.
In all my years as an audiophile, or working in retail, I have never known a person that owned Quads, never seen a store that carried them, and never seen a trade-in pair in the used section.This was very unlike when the Dahlquist DQ-10 came out and almost all high-end stores carried them. It was said that they looked very "Quad-like", yet I'd never seen or heard the original Quads in this country. The first I really heard about them over here was when they introduced their (405?) "current dumping amplifier and it was reviewed in Audio magazine. A few years later Richard Heyser reviewed the ESL-63 speaker, but he said that he was bothered by a resonance at 5kHz. I can't remember if he had yet invented his TDS technique that allowed waterfall plots to show the resonances.
But they sure weren't common in any place where I've ever lived.
Oh, wait! I take that back. I did see two pairs of Quads one time. It was when the original Mark Levinson had the HQD speakers. There was a local dealer with a pair, but he wouldn't even turn them on for a scruffy college student.
Edits: 11/01/17 11/01/17 11/08/17
Jon Dahlquist was a HUGE original Quad fan. He used stacked originals. And that was his inspiration for the DQ-10 he was trying to make the original Quad.
Sal Marantz said they could have made a much better speaker if Jon had not been wedded to the idea they had to look identical to the original Quad and basically they do.
Back in the day I saw, heard original Quads at all kinds of dealers. Of course not as many dealers carried Quad as say Dahlquist but they had plenty of dealers. Mostly dealers that carried the very best of the day, Mark Levinson, ARC, etc.
With 55,000 units produced they are not that rare. For a high-end speaker that is pretty impressive production numbers.
Since they have been long out production about the only place you can hear them now is at a show. I Just showed them at CAF. To say the room was a hit would be an understatement. No matter ones exposure to high-end audio the original Quad working properly should still impress. Nothing has come along in 60 years that truly displaces, makes irrelevant the original Quad.
Perfect? No but what is. But everyone that hears them instantly understands why they are legendary. They fundamentally get it right more than I can say for most speakers. I imagine we will be talking about them 60 years from now.
I think Charles's youth must have been a bit sheltered. I heard them up here in the Frozen North a scant few years after their introduction (and later repeatedly, even in double sets). I was young; my ears were sharp; my father was buying new speakers faster than new cars, and I was heavily into comparisons. The original Quads had an extraordinarily neutral and natural-sounding mid-range. Little deep bottom, high top, or loud volume, but exemplary for the piano trios my mother spent much of her time playing. That mid-range, for me, set a standard -- it may have been surpassed, but I never had the chance to find out. Though I was subsequently smitten by various Dayton-Wrights and Acoustats, I was never able to compare the various 'stats with each other. Brand distinctions aside, electrostatic mid-range to me seems superior to that produced by any other technology.
Thanks for reminding me.
Jeremy
"This was very unlike when the Dahlquist DQ-10 came out and almost all high-end stores carried them."
Without doubt the most cost-effective audio purchase I ever made. After owning them for 7-8 years, I compared them to the Acoustat 1+1, 2+2, and a pair of used Quad ESL-63s. By the end of that long afternoon my admiration for Jon Dahlquist had grown significantly.
Wow , Charles you must be the only person in HiFi to never hear an ESL57....
I actually had a pair. But they were in non-working order. This was about 1985 or so - so long ago that don't even remember how I got them - maybe a dealer trade-in. I looked at them and realized it would take a month of Sundays to get them running properly, and sold them. I never have heard them, although I've heard tons of electrostatics, from Stax headphones to Acoustats to Martin-Logans to Beveridge to some direct-drive tweeters I made using RTR panels. But I've never heard Roger Wests, Quads (when I was going to shows like CES, nobody had them on display), Dayton-Wrights, Infinity Servo-Statiks, or any of the other dozens of smaller brands.When I was a kid my father couldn't afford JansZen tweeters for his AR speakers, so he bought some Lafeyette ESL's, but it turns out they were only single-ended and not push-pull. I think they were $20 a pair in 1961.
When I started getting into building and designing loudspeakers, I wanted to make something that sounded like electrostatics but didn't need multi-kilovolt polarizing voltages. I thought the biggest secret was that ESL must be pistonic, with their "force over area" approach. When I finally figured out how to measure diaphragm motion without a laser scanner ($50,000 back in the 1980s and still about the same today, although the dollars are worth far less) I found out that ESLs are not pistonic and that there are ways to design with dynamic drivers so that they operate pistonically.
That is the single largest coloration is most systems. When the diaphragm breaks up, it is resonating in chaotic modes, much like a cymbal does.
You can easily do a thought experiment (assuming you have ever held a pair of cymbals and struck them together, or hit a cymbal with a dtrumstick). Imagine a bunch of cymbals that are identically shaped and dimensioned - down to the grooves in the surface left by the turning process used to form them. Got it?
OK, no have one of the cymbals be brass (normal), one be of aluminum, one be of steel, one be of polystyrene (model car plastic), one be of polyethylene (Tupperware plastic), one made of glass, one made of solid diamond, one made of Bakelite (composite of thermoset plastic and either cloth or glass fabric, like the black heat-resistant handles on older cookware), one made of pressed paper pulp (like a speaker cone), one made of rubber (like an inner tube), one made of cotton cloth coated with damping goo, and one made of silk cloth coated with damping goo.
No imagine striking all of these cymbals with a drumstick. Will they all sound the same? If not, why?
Edits: 11/01/17
Charles:
I understand what you are saying, so I think there must me more because, despite the theoretical validity of what you propose, I have not yet heard any conventional speaker (or, for that matter, any planar magnetic) that, compared to a good electrostat, does not sound "indelicate", incapable of subtlety. Vocabulary fails me.
Jeremy
Charles ,
I know leak experimented with pistonic drivers in the 60's , but i will give you credit for it in the 90's ....
:)
Regards
Neither Leak nor I had laser scanners at our disposal. It's kind of a tough nut to crack. I thought I had figured it out in 1985, but was wrong. Once I got serious about building loudspeakers and started a company, we bought a Crown (later Techron) TEF (Time, Energy, Frequency) analyzer, invented by audio genius Richard C. Heyser. That's when I finally figured out a way to positively, absolutely measure cone breakup. I had built several fully pistonic speakers before then (using my earlier method), but couldn't prove they were pistonic until I got the machine and figured out an improved measurement method. So I actually did it in 1985, but didn't know it until 1986. Then we built pistonic loudspeakers but the really good ones didn't come out until 1987.
I never told anyone the "secret", as it seemed so simple. I figured it was just a matter of time until everyone figured it out. I left Avalon in 1991 and kept waiting. And waiting. And waiting. It wasn't until Laurence Dickie made the original Nautilus in 1994 that the next one was built. I'm not sure if he talked about it or not. He must have known what he was doing, as you can't quite do it by accident. (Although Jon Dahlquist almost did it by accident with his DQ-10. Much of what people loved about those speakers was due to the fact that they were far more pistonic than the average speaker of the day.)
By 2000 or so a *lot* of people were talking about "pistonic speakers", but none of them were. Even the Avalons went backwards, and were less well behaved than the speakers I had made in 1985. It wasn't until Laurence Dickie released his Vivid Giyas that a company was making fully pistonic speakers, and Andrew Jones with the big TADs. I can't remember which of those came first.
I am kind of surprised that Andrew's designs for Elac are not pistonic. It costs more to make them that way, but not that much more. One company that got kind of close was the old Canadian speaker company, Energy. They had the Veritas 2.8 that was a a fairly close copy of the Avalon Ascent as far as the drivers (two 8" woofers instead of one 11") and crossovers, but in a more conventional looking cabinet. I'm not sure when it came out but Stererephile reviewed it in June 1995.
One of the problems with a truly pistonic speaker is that all of the first-order colorations are stripped away. The speaker is so much more faithful to the source that it can be a double-edged sword. If there is anything wrong with your upstream electronics, a pistonic speaker will let you know about it real fast. It's definitely easier to get "pleasant" sound with a speaker that hides things, much like they used to put Vaseline on movie camera lenses for close-ups of actresses - to "smooth out" the wrinkles in their skin.
And sine 99.9% of all speakers are non-pistonic, everybody is so used to hearing that coloration that they don't usually even notice it. It's kind of like water to a fish. But if you ever hear a system with purely pistonic radiators and really good upstream electronics, it is very, very hard to go back.
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