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RE: Perhaps right, definitely partially wrong.

'Some say that was the real reason the ESL-63 took so long - Walker was trying to side-step Malme's patent.'

Charlie we have had this discussion before. The only similarity between Malme's work and Walker's 63 is they are both round. Kind of. Malme's was actually round and Walker's was rectangular trying to be round to emulate a true point source. Both segmented the driver but Walker's was a series of concentric rings Malme's was not.

The delay line Walker implemented in the 63 was Kellogg's idea not Malme's. Refer to Kellogg's patent 1,983,377 issued in 1934. With some small changes this was Walker's delay line. Malme's approach was quite different. And Walker was talking about Kellogg's work in his original ESL patent well before anyone would have known about Malme's work.

The concentric ring idea was Shorter's patent from 1941 G.B. Patent 537,931. Shorter's was different in that his work had each concentric ring playing a specific frequency range like we see in the typical multi-driver system, i.e. tweeter, midrange, woofer, etc.

People can claim, for whatever reason, that Walker borrowed, or stole, Malme's work but this is simply not the case. One only needs to look at the relevant patent documents to see where Walker got his ideas and I see nothing of consequence in Walker's 63 that looks like Malme's other than the above mentioned round thing and they are both stats. Certainly nothing in Walker's work stepped on any part of Malme's patent. Walker was quite open about where he got his ideas. He never once claimed an idea as his own that was in fact another's. When discussing the ESL-63 he always referred to Kellogg's and Shorter's work.

From Walker's 1979 AES paper:

"So, finally, what is new about all this? Really, it is a lot of old ideas fitted together. Kellogg in 1929 proposed the connection of a series of electrostatic elements by inductors as a delay line. His idea was to improve efficiency and reduce the power requirement from amplifiers. Shorter of the BBC took out a patent in 1941 describing the connection of a series of annular rings using resistors and Janszen, in 1953, suggested variations on the same theme.

In effect therefore, all I have done is to collect these ideas and add a little work which says that if you can make the device acoustically transparent, then the performance can be predicted. We think this is very important since it enables correction to the performance to be made very easily and after simple laboratory measurements."

Which one sounds better? The world will never know. Malme's work never made it into production. I have done some experiments along the line of Malme's work and I will keep my conclusions private.

If one wishes to beat up on Walker OK but the Malme thing is way off the mark. Walker did claim the constant-charge approach in his original ESL patent when we all know this was Hunt's idea although I don't see where Hunt ever applied for a patent on the idea. I have heard stories that DNT Williamson was upset with Walker for making the constant-charge idea part of the patent but I don't know if this is true or not. I believe I read this comment in an interview with Baxendall. Walker could have been a complete dick with his competitors for using the constant-charge approach in their speakers, shut them down if you like, it was part of his ESL patent. But he didn't.

The reason it took so long for the ESL-63 to come to market? I will go with what Ross Walker had to say about the speaker it 'was the most diabolical bit of product engineering you've ever come across'. One only need read Kessler's book to see all the engineering issues Quad had with the design. It took years to sort out the problems. It had nothing to do with waiting for a patent to expire.

As someone that works on the 63 type speaker everyday I can state without reservation they are a bitch to work with. But this is the case with stats the reason why so few companies have succeeded with this technology.

My comments here are in no way an attempt to insult you or your work. I have the greatest respect for you personally and the work you have done in the industry. And I can say with a great deal of certainty that you have probably forgotten more about audio design in general, and speaker design in particular, than I will ever know. I am just a mechanic. But I do believe that any comments about Walker treading on Malme's work are specious as best.

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  Kimber Kable  

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