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Hi -FI Riff - The Quad ESL 63 - A Legend in it's own lifetime and beyond

I've had ESL63s for about 20 years now - here's how they are currently set up in my study;


They are raised about 4 inches from the floor on some custom Mana stands, and are toed in so that they are between 70 and 100 centimetres from the wall behind them. I had the 63s fully serviced - all panels replaced by Quad - about 18 months ago. I am currently running the Rose 201E directly into the Quads, and will probably try using the Pathos and the NAP100 as intermediary amplifiers over the next few weeks, to see what works best.

I listen mainly to chamber music (string quartets, piano, lieder), contemporary classical and small-ish group jazz & improv, for which the 63s work well. I'm also increasingly listening to audio books, and find the tone of a narrator's voice through the 63s very good to listen to over an extended reading session of several hours. I'm a bit puzzled by repeated comments on bass, as the bass seems true and authentic to me - the cello on, say, Schubert's quintet, or Julius Hemphill's Dogon AD is very accurate and similar to what you would hear if a cello was being played in the room. On Mingus' 'Solo Dancer', there is a repeated trombone rasp which is also reproduced with startling clarity. I'm even more puzzled by the idea of adding super tweeters, for similar reasons. I have recently tried various active monitors (Kii, ATC), and they don't let you listen to the music in the same way - I haven't yet heard a different speaker that allows you to listen to the flow, integration and argument of the music in such an unimpeded way.

The two main downsides are (i) the amount of room they require (I'd like to find a speaker that takes up less room, so that I can reorganise my study - Harbeth P3s might be an option?), and (ii) cost - you need to factor in the cost of periodic panel replacement (probably every 10-15 years or so, depending in the temperature and humidity of the environment in which they are used).
 
I had Quad 57s in the early 70s driven by 33 &303. The quality of the treble was tremendous if everything was right, but getting everything right wasn’t easy. The problem for me was the narrow beam of sound in the vertical plane. I’d put on a record, sit down and it would sound really good so I’d relax back into the sofa, unconsciously lowering my head and the treble would disappear. You could argue that I should have adjusted the tilt for the most relaxed pose but sometimes you want to sit up so it was never right all the time.
I also found them difficult to live with - not very stable on their 3 legs (especially with young children around), taking up a lot of space (not too close to the back wall). I put them on casters to try to solve that one. Needing power as well as signal cables didn’t help although I tried coiled stretch cables for easy moving on the casters. In the end I traded them in, with some regret, for B&W floorstanders. Not as good as the Quads at their best but much easier to live with.
 
Miss Ariel said:
Another great chat about the Quad ESL 63 by Mike Evans and Dave Price.
Mike Evans has just got a pair and they discuss whats great about them and whats not.

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Thanks for sharing this video.

I am in the US have had my 63s for 8 years and restored by one of the few experts in the country. For each of those eight years, I tried to replace these with various other speakers but the Quads always won.

Most monitors didn’t have the perfectly real tone and detailed sound of the Quads and lost the battle quite quickly. Harbeth 30.2 stayed for a while as they were quite close in realism. It wasn’t until I put the 63s back in place that I heard the low bass that was missing with the Harbeths.

I now have a smaller listening room in a new home that is not aesthetically cooperative with the Quads so they have been supplanted by a much more expensive modern speaker (Fink Team Kim) and another vintage legend (AR3A).

It really did take quite a significant effort and investment to find something better than the Quads in a speaker made today and with the Acoustic Research, quite a lot of effort and risk involved in obtaining an accurately restored example.
 
Tantris said:
I'm a bit puzzled by repeated comments on bass, as the bass seems true and authentic to me - the cello on, say, Schubert's quintet, or Julius Hemphill's Dogon AD is very accurate and similar to what you would hear if a cello was being played in the room. On Mingus' 'Solo Dancer', there is a repeated trombone rasp which is also reproduced with startling clarity. I'm even more puzzled by the idea of adding super tweeters, for similar reasons. I have recently tried various active monitors (Kii, ATC), and they don't let you listen to the music in the same way - I haven't yet heard a different speaker that allows you to listen to the flow, integration and argument of the music in such an unimpeded way.
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I think the whole thing is complicated. Whether the perceived bass is satisfactory is dependent partly on expectations, the sort of music, the rest of the system, the room, the listening position, and the recording and the listener. And whether supertweeters improve people’s perceptions of what they’re hearing depends on all those things too - bear in mind that they are not about boosting treble, their function is to give the listener a greater sense of energy and clarity and analyticity. All these things are partly, mainly even, psychological. I like to listen far away, I like the room resonances that brings. And I like to listen to organ music, instruments built into cathedrals with pipes 16’ long and longer. So sometimes for me adding more power to the bass response is valuable.

As far as a speaker a which allows you to listen to flow, integration etc of the music in an unimpeded way, I have heard one, I own one, but it is extremely rare. It is the JR 149 Mk 2. Less coloured, less cute sounding, than the Mk 1. it’s not very good for listening at a distance to cathedral organs though.
 
I have the 2905, think they are about 15 years old now. They were going for a song on the 'Wam last year. I don't think they are much different to the 63s except they are heavier and more rigid. I have no lack of bass from them - have them about 1.5 m from rear wall.

Dynamic speakers can do "punchier" bass, and for some modern pop/rock the bass from the 2905s can be a little bit slow. I use PEQ on my DAC to corect for this to a small degree - but for everything else there is no contest, the quads just let the music flow into the room with no sense of it coming from a box.

I can't figure the logic behind amps for them... for most of the year I have been driving them with a Quad Artera power amp and that's been great, have really enjoyed it. But yesterday a 2nd hand Graaf GM50 arrived, 50 watts of KT90. OMG its now in another dimension...and the bass is deeper and tighter than before. I had tried Prima Luna EL34 based (Premium 400 I think?) power amps with them last year and wasn't impressed.... it just seems to be a lottery what is sublime vs. what is merely good.
 
GavinA said:
I had Quad 57s in the early 70s driven by 33 &303. The quality of the treble was tremendous if everything was right, but getting everything right wasn’t easy. The problem for me was the narrow beam of sound in the vertical plane. I’d put on a record, sit down and it would sound really good so I’d relax back into the sofa, unconsciously lowering my head and the treble would disappear. You could argue that I should have adjusted the tilt for the most relaxed pose but sometimes you want to sit up so it was never right all the time.
I also found them difficult to live with - not very stable on their 3 legs (especially with young children around), taking up a lot of space (not too close to the back wall). I put them on casters to try to solve that one. Needing power as well as signal cables didn’t help although I tried coiled stretch cables for easy moving on the casters. In the end I traded them in, with some regret, for B&W floorstanders. Not as good as the Quads at their best but much easier to live with.
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Exactly my experience. I can deal with that.
 
gustav_errata said:
Way down in Devon.
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Find yrself in Bath with time to spare & you’ll be welcome.

(my views v much as @Tantris above. The bass quality of timbre and inflection is, well, I cannot think of anything that does as well. And thy dynamic range is stupendous - all the way doen into the noise. Cd post at length but oresently waiting for a flight)
 
@Dowser - just saying,,,, you really need a second pair, and run them in parallel. Yes, side by side 63s rather than stacked one on top of the other like the 57s. Quite a large step forward that I only hear people saying won't work... but who haven't tried it.
 
fran said:
@Dowser - just saying,,,, you really need a second pair, and run them in parallel. Yes, side by side 63s rather than stacked one on top of the other like the 57s. Quite a large step forward that I only hear people saying won't work... but who haven't tried it.
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Have wondered about that but doesn't it corrupt the point source design?
 
Tantris said:
I'm a bit puzzled by repeated comments on bass, as the bass seems true and authentic to me..
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On acoustic instruments I'm sure it is. Try AC/DC? ;0) Just so happens I had a friend over last night who is a hi-fi buff, builds his own kit, has Quad 57s among a bunch of other speakers and is a BBC sound engineer. We were talking about speakers quite a bit, as you can imagine he's heard a heck of a lot of stuff. Last thing I put on was 'Hell's Bells' pretty loud, at eleven O-clock which was a little remiss, and we were taking about how good the Isobarik bass is. Tight, deep, powerful and very natural. Quads might be able to do a deep string instrument beautifully but a kick drum or electric bass is different thing.

Every speaker is a compromise and it's just about which ones you can live with. The Quads sound brilliant for what you're using them for but I listen to mostly rock and pop and couldn't live with them long term.

Incidentally, I was asking him about what was getting used in studios these days. He said it was a mixture of things but one brand everyone seems to be impressed with is Bearfoot. I've never heard of them but he said they were very good.
 
fran said:
@Dowser - just saying,,,, you really need a second pair, and run them in parallel. Yes, side by side 63s rather than stacked one on top of the other like the 57s. Quite a large step forward that I only hear people saying won't work... but who haven't tried it.
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Haha @fran - I don’t have the same size listening room as I did in Dublin - what you see in my photo is about it :) I’ve passed on multiple sets of cheap 57s and 63s over the years hear as I no longer have the space.
 
Robn said:
Have wondered about that but doesn't it corrupt the point source design?
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Of course it does, but you may not notice and feel it’s an improvement. My system has stopped being a point source system because I use subwoofers, I very much doubt that the timing is accurately adjusted, I’ve certainly not obsessed about the timing. But I don’t hear any splashiness in the image. Others may, it’s all a question of aural sensitivity.

Hifi at home isn’t a theoretical thing, that’s the problem. Paper calculations can indicate the effect of a change, but it may not be reflected in what you hear when it’s implemented.

(I can certainly see why you don’t want to have four large electrostatic speakers in a room!)
 
mandryka said:
Of course it does, but you may not notice and feel it’s an improvement. My system has stopped being a point source system because I use subwoofers, I very much doubt that the timing is accurately adjusted, I’ve certainly not obsessed about the timing. But I don’t hear any splashiness in the image. Others may, it’s all a question of aural sensitivity.

Hifi at home isn’t a theoretical thing, that’s the problem. Paper calculations can indicate the effect of a change, but it may not be reflected in what you hear when it’s implemented.

(I can certainly see why you don’t want to have four large electrostatic speakers in a room!)
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id love to try - fairly sure in my old 6x5 mtr listening room in Dublin it could have shone - not in my current ca 3x4 mtr one :)
 
Its one of those things that 2 of us here have tried (both of us have 2 sets of 63s). Both up around a foot off the floor, arranged side by side, and in a curve so that both 63s are perpendicular to the listener. Much bigger impact and no penalty that we can detect. Similar in a lot of ways to stacking 57s, but horizontally rather than vertically. Both sets wired in parallel rather than series.
 
fran said:
Its one of those things that 2 of us here have tried (both of us have 2 sets of 63s). Both up around a foot off the floor, arranged side by side, and in a curve so that both 63s are perpendicular to the listener. Much bigger impact and no penalty that we can detect. Similar in a lot of ways to stacking 57s, but horizontally rather than vertically. Both sets wired in parallel rather than series.
Click to expand...

That's not how Robertson-Aikman music room placed them.
Have you tried his way?
 
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