One thing Audio
Quad
ESL 57, Owners, Michael
six in a row
We (One Thing) had been invited to a remote location (actually a manor house on a vast estate) in which a number of our 'modified' ESLs had been installed. 6 pairs had been modified and sent out over a short period to a single customer, and we were more than curious. A correspondence ensued. The owner, Michael, had assembled the costliest and least compromised system we had heard about (ironically, we had provided the 'cheapo' part of his system in the 57 rebuilds. but the purchase had nothing to do with price, Michael explained. He simply hadn't found a speaker which sounds better!)
One of Michael's first comments was, 'You know, what is so remarkable about these speakers is that they appear to have no inherent limitations. As you improve the source equipment, they just get better and better’. 'I know, I know’ I said with a wry smile, remembering that 'concert-hall perspective’ I thought I had heard as a teenager in 1960! This is how Michael describes his system:
Kuama Stabi XL Turntable A superb piece of HG Wells-looking engineering, this is superior to any other deck I have heard. It weighs 75 kilogrammes -without the arm tower SME V wired with Kondo silver wire. Kondo KSL lo-J Cartridge with the KSL impedance matching transformer for moving coil cartridges. Kondo KSL M7 Phono stage. Kondo KSL M77 Line amplifier Jadis JA 500 main amplifier x 2. The 6550s in the latter are new old stock General Electric -far superior to the standard 6550s which were Svetlanas. The ECC83s and ECC84s in the Jadis are Brimar Military Specification. Quad ESL57s 3 pairs, modified by One Thing Audio. The six speakers are arranged across the width of the room, not stacked. This sounds as if it would produce all kinds of problems technically... but it does not. Kondo silver Interconnects A V.P.1 record cleaning machine was at the service of what we estimated to be around 8000 LPs -but these were just the ones in view! ! Despite the impressiveness of this line-up (oh, and by the way, Michael has an identical system in his second home in Thailand)...Michael is no conventional audiophile. In his teens, his musical tastes barely extended beyond pop and rock music. Then he 'discovered' the world of classical music. He is now predominantly a jazz and classical music lover, but with little interest in 'modern' recordings (or indeed, even stereo recording ).
...and here's how such a system looks like..
He shares with the impresario Walter Legge the belief that great music-making communicates more intimately in mono sound (and I am surprised at the number of musicians I know who concur with this view). His real passion is for the great artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and flicking through his collection names like Gieseking, Gitlis, Kreisler, Oistrakh, Solomon, Furtwangler and Flagstadt keep recurring. He is a music lover who has spared no expense to bring to life the great recordings of the past in the intimacy of his own music room.
We did take along some of our own recordings with which we were familiar. One is confronted with a wall of sound which is weighty and rich, but incisive and delicate -deep bass grumblings made my eyes flash to the right as if I expected to see the musicians, and at one point a cymbal crash pinned me to the back of the settee. The sound might be expected to be overpowering, but not so; the abiding impression was one of tonal accuracy, spaciousness and delicacy. Our only reservation concerned the slightly ill-defined imaging produced by such an unusual uniplaned array, but as this could be modified or improved at the drop of a hat it's just a question of whether Michael has the time or inclination to do it!So then...high-end esoterica to take one's breath away, the stuff of which dreams are made. Thank you Michael for your time and hospitality. (But isn't it about time you got rid of those old-fashioned radiators?) Ouch, someone just kicked me!
Ron Best, mid September, 2005
