Can One have too much of a good Thing?
Owners of the
Quad ESL 57
One Thing Audio
Quad
ESL 57, Owners
Can One have too much of a good Thing?
It must have been around 1960 that I first heard a 'stereo pair’ of Quad electrostatic speakers. My diary entry of the time states: 'This is the ultimate in the reproduction of full frequency sound. It is quite uncanny. You are 'there' -right in the concert hall’. As a teenage concert-goer whose personal wealth extended to the odd ‘prom’ ticket at Leicester's De Montford Hall, I am obliged to take this 'aural snapshot in time' quite seriously.
Yet with hindsight, some things don't add up. The owner's preamp was home-made, as were his Mullard 510 monoblocks. There was a Roger's 'switched' FM tuner offering Home, Light and Third programmes. A Truvox open-reel deck had been modified to play back American stereophonic tapes, but was currently performing only in mono! but the real jaw-dropping item was a sturdy piece of engineering I describe as a turntable built up to broadcasting standard'. This was a Garrard 301, but in a dark grey finish. For some reason (brain overload?) I failed to log the pickup, except to mention that it tracked at a 'mere' 3.5 grammes (struth, how does the needle stay in the groove?). But in quotes, although added years later, is a scribble 'Decca ffss Mk 1'. The diary entry concludes with this learned pronouncement: 'There are no cones as such. Just a series of vibrating plates'. Well, perhaps not the definitive description, but I pride myself on the fact that the word 'radiator’doesn't appear anywhere!If you have a system which (perhaps unexpectedly) drives the ESL57s in an exemplary manner and would care to share your thoughts, do write in. Half our emails are enquiries for the 'ideal ' system to drive ESLs, and we can only concentrate on ‘technical' requirements, but often that isn’t much help to the punter. Amplifier manufacturers themselves can be infuriatingly vague -or unforgivably ignorant -when asked about the stability of their output stages into difficult loads. But don't write in about OTL stages for which you would need to remortgage your home. This is not that kind of site!
So here you will find systems based on our modified ESL57s at opposite ends of the economic spectrum. In their different ways, they all impress equally. but there is a common denominator...
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