One Thing Audio
Quad
Reviews, ESL 57, Salvatore Sacca
Salvatore Sacca
Hello Steve/Ron,
My apologies first: I should, and would, have written this much sooner, hadn’t I experienced an unbelievable series of inconveniences (cd player failure; amp power valves failure -in a row!; then, moving to a new listening room: quite smallish -about 13’4” long and 11’8” wide- but music-dedicated only, and acoustically treated) which made even burning in the speakers a tough task. But eventually, after two months, it’s time to report you my listening impressions.
In a nutshell: this is an astounding speaker. I was doubtful whether it would make me forget my beloved 63s, but geez, that stunning, lifelike midrange palpability really is something once heard, never forgotten: it makes everything else sound boxed, constrained -in a word: mechanical. Ok, ok, I know you know that, so let’s take it for granted. What I definitely could not take for granted were the following (supposed) deficiencies, which I realized that, quite simply, aren’t there:
1)- “no bass, you’ll need a subwoofer”. This really is beyond me, to the point that I’m inclined to think that your job on the bass panels must have given them something that the original Esl missed. I can’t understand what all the fuss is about: to me, it’s obvious that you get all the bass every serious listener could reasonably ask for; and it’s taut, tuneful, and devoid of the usual boxy colorations typical of dynamic speakers. Of course, you can’t go lower than the 45-50 cycles region, nor can match a big, horn-loaded woofer's impact: but, even so, to my ears at least, clearly Premier League.
2)- “no dynamics”. A personal disclosure: I’m not a listener of the faint-hearted kind. I do like seriously projected horns, and dynamics -along with accuracy in timbre- is something I would never trade in. That said, Quads’ dynamics -and I mean micro and macro- are definitely, absolutely first class. Well, they can’t reproduce the visceral impact of a great orchestra; but, in my personal experience, no loudspeaker located in a reasonably sized room ever did it.
3)- “they can’t play loud”. Ludicrous, if you’re not deaf. See points 1 and 2.
That said, we can’t hide that the speakers do have a few shortcomings (to the average listener’s ears, at least); to wit,
a) room positioning is a real PITA.
b) the speakers beam very, very much;
c) the soundstage is someway constrained, in width more than in depth; not on a par with the one provided by the typical high-end-mega-buck modern speaker.
While I guess that a) is maybe part of the fun, I realize that b) and c) can be particularly annoying to some listeners. Having said, as to beaming, that one’s not supposed to listen to music and walking at the same time, I was wondering whether the two issues were somehow related one another; I mean, very narrow dispersion may lead to very good imaging (in fact, the 57s do image very well!), but also to a soundstage narrower than the one you can expect in a speaker with wide lateral dispersion: in that case, you actually listen to the boudaries’ reflections, and probably get a wider and deeper soundstage...along with all the related phase shifts!! I’m no electrical engineer: is this correct? Anyway, I must recognize that I’m strongly biased against all the soundstage-wider-than-the-room-walls issue, which always looked to me a hi-fi-ish artifice with little, or no, resemblance to real music. This is to say, that may be a big problem for someone, but not for me.
Two last points. The first: I’m afraid you’ve been a bit too optimistic about burning in. Forty hours are not enough in my opinion, the speakers had been getting better and better for the first one hundred hours, and I feel they still get better, although to a lesser degree, even today, after several hundreds hours of use.
The second point regards Gary Jacobsen’s treble panel comparison, which I guess you’ve heard about, and which I found somewhat disconcerting. Now, I haven’t heard an original Quad Esl 57, thus my feelings are not based upon personal experience; anyway, I can’t even imagine a driver which, compared to yours, makes it sound “soft” and lacking in “excitement”. Really, I can’t. I guess that electrical mismatches played a big role in this issue, and I think you should someway emphasize the point.
Well, I rambled a little bit...Uh, one last thing: THANK YOU, for the best spent money in all my audiophile life and... who knows?, stacked Quads, should finances allow, can become an option in the future... Cheers.Salvatore Sacca (salsacc@tin.it)
Ron’s comments
With typical English ‘insularity’ we are slightly embarrassed to confess that we expected much of the interest in our 57 re-vamps to be contained within these shores, so it is both humbling and surprising to find that the liveliest interest comes from as far afield as Australia, Hong Kong and Italy!
But Salvatore’s email differs from most in that, intermingled with the praise for which we are duly grateful, is some spot-on analysis of the 57s strengths, weaknesses and foibles. The latter is intrinsic to the 50’s design of the 57s, so frankly there’s little we can (or should) do about that (without those foibles it wouldn’t be the beloved 57 we all know and accept). To this extent, we have done nothing to ‘alter’ the mechanical characteristics of the original, so Salvator’s comments should be read as applying to Quad’s original and our latter-day re-vamp. What we have done is attempted to make the 57’s bass faster and more impactful, and the treble sweeter and more ‘open’.
The narrow ‘beaming’ of the 57s which Salvatore describes so well is a most interesting area of discussion and/or speculation. All electrostats employing a narrow virtical strip for the dispersion of high frequencies will ‘beam’ to a greater or lesser extend. Indeed, the American guru of ELS design, Roger Sanders, has stated his belief that narrow treble dispersion in an electrostat is the ONLY way to hear the treble with full impact – with all the realism, speed and entrancing filigree datail. Any attempt to widen this dispersion will kill this effect stone dead (we really do know, having spent 5 years in a frustrating – and largely unsuccessful – attempt to address this problem!) But – I hear large numbers of people protesting – isn’t the problem largely solved in the marvellous ESL 63 or its later battleship derivatives? Precisely. That is what Peter Walker set out to do and this is what he brilliantly achieved – producing the world’s most accurate sound reproducer. However, the sound we hear and respond to is very personal, very subjective, and – perhaps regrettably – is not always about accuracy. An engineer can quite easily map ‘signal in, signal out’ accuracy if he is designing his ‘perfect’ reproducer, but he shouldn’t feel too slighted if the music-lover standing beside him says he doesn’t think much of the sound! And don’t fool yourself by thinking that only ‘live sound’ can put the matter into proper perspective. Some years ago – at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester, I listened to a terrific performance of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. In the interval I said to a colleague, ‘That tam-tam crash at the end left my ears ringing for five minutes’. To which he replied, ‘Yes, it was good, but it didn’t sound particularly loud from where I was sitting!’ Directionality and sound reflection has for donkey’s years occupied engineers far more capable than I. Designers of modern concert halls are only just coming to grips with the fundamentals of this obtuse subject, but isn’t it ironic that the best of them have complex provision for the continuous ‘adjustment’ of those acoustics?
Anyway, Salvatore, thank you for your careful analysis. The ESL 57 is a ‘flawed’ design, and it takes ages to learn how to live with it (Don’t all 57 owners know!), but I can’t help but repeat David Price’s amusing but deadly accurate comment, “It’s as if the ESL 57s are saying, ‘Okay, if you don’t like me then I’m not going to let you love another!’” That’s it. Precisely.
