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Not sure if this is a speaker issue or not, but here goes:
On massed chorus pieces ("Messiah", "Israel In Egypt", etc), the sound tends to be grainy (distorted) through my speakers (a/d/s 1230s). By comparison, the sound driven through my earspeakers (Sennheiser 595) produces a tighter image. Now, this could be an amp (Quad 405) issue, because plugging in the earspeakers cuts off the power amp, leaving only the preamp (Nakamichi 410) to drive the Sennheisers. Solo voices and instruments through the a/d/s speakers sound fine. Accoustics could also play a role (listening room resonances), I guess.
Any thoughts?
Follow Ups:
I listen for clarity and separation of voices in the soundfield. Large-scale choral works require the utmost resolution & transparency and are degraded even more than other types of music by grain and etch.
It could be that your amp is the problem. My current amp is the cleanest, most grunge-free, and at the same time most transparent I've owned. It happens to be an SDS-258 from Class D Audio.
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... 99%'er
I had a quad 405 amp for a while in the 80s. It seemed to me to run out of power on loud passages and this was audible on my 4 ohm ADS 810s.
If you have another amp to try, I'd do that.
The Quad drove my 810s as it now drives my 1230s. At 94db, the 1230s are easy to dive, especially for a 100w/ch amp like the 405. So I've never felt the amp lacked adequate power. I am curius, though, what I'd hear trying another 100 watt amp. A friend said he'd lend me his Bryston to audition with an option to buy.
as problematic? If there are any non polar electrolytic caps in the crossover they will need to be replaced by now due to age related decay.
No, the problem is just in choral passages, and then some worse than others. How does one go about getting caps replaced? I'll admit it - I have no idea what an electrolytic crosssover is.
Earphones will almost always sound cleaner/clearer
I hear ya.Distorted sound, "grainy" as you put it, with a large choral ensemble is not unusual. It's one of the most difficult music sources to record and reproduce with a high level of quality, largely due to the extreme complexity of the waveform, and our sensitivity to it.
In my experience, one solution is to maximize the quality of the microphones. Even then, downstream, the quality of components will be important.
You can also tame it down by using multiple mikes across the chorus, and mixing the results appropriately. Oddly enough, this is partly because the more stuff you put in the chain, the less the details will matter.
hth
Edits: 06/26/12
Try another amp.
As for me, the 405 uses dated 70s era LM301 op amps that are not known for the smoothest response. Hence, the 405-2 appeared later which used better TL072s and fixed the current limiting stage.
In '76, Frank Van Alstine offered an upgrade to the Dyna PAT-5 which replaced the lowly LM301s with far better LF356s. It was much better sounding.
I always include some mixed choral music when auditioning speakers because it is very revealing of speaker faults. Assuming speaker placement is good, I would think it is a speaker problem.
The Quad 405 is a nice amp.
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
Some chorus recordings sound better than others, producing a near solid image as oppposed to the grainy image on other recordings. So I'm guessing its the quality of the recording perhaps more than the limitations of the speakers. The 1230s have always been highly regarded.
The ADS speakers did have a good reputation. Some of my early Telarc recordings were monitored using ADS 1530 speakers, and they used Schoeps microphones. What kind of shape are your speakers in? They are fairly old and sometimes things can go wrong with the crossover caps and the drivers after many years.
Poor recording quality is always a possibility. It used to be that many choral recordings were not very good, or maybe I was just unlucky in some of my choices back then in the late 70s. Still, I have a number of choral recordings by Philips, Telarc, London, EMI, and Denon, etc., which are good enough to use for auditioning speakers
E-stat is right that there was an upgrade to the Quad 405. The Quad 405-2 came out in 1982, with some more current capacity and some different parts. I expect that's the one you have, anyway. There was a not very expensive kit to upgrade the older models to 405-2.
While the 405-2 was still not an amplifier to drive really difficult low impedance loads, E-stat might be surprised at just what it would drive. I heard the Snell type A in a store, and driving them to loud levels was this tiny little amplifier, a Quad 405. It must have been in the '80s because it was playing Haydn's Paukenmesse, and I knew the music because we had performed it. Reviewer Leonard Feldman of the old Audio magazine found the Quad 405-2 drove his ig Kef 105 speakers very well, and of course, a number of people drove the Quad ESL-63 with them. I haven't found enough information on the ADS 1230 to know how hard it is to drive, but I doubt if you have any problems there as you would have noticed.
It's a nice amp though I went with the bigger Quad 606.
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"A fool and his money are soon parted." --- Thomas Tusser
I have the original Quad 405, unmodified. As noted, the amp sounds great with almost all types of music, including some chorus recordings. I just checked the drivers on my a/d/s 1230s, and they look fine to me. The shiny gauze material on the mid-range and tweeter drivers remain shiny and sticky. The paper woofers and their rubber surrounds also look solid.
I guess choral pieces are among the most difficult to reproduce, even in the live concert hall. Still, I'm thinking that I might get better results with planers or eletrostatics, speakers that emphasize the mid-range spectrum. In fact, I once owned a pair of Quad 57s, then traded them in for the a/d/s 810s (before I moved up to the 1230s) after a year because of their obvious short-comings.
This is a loudspeaker/room issue and not the electronics
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