Historical

One of the less-glamorous speaker systems around today, these have more to offer the critical listener in terms of satisfaction than do most of the more-exotic designs.

The Dalhquist DQ-10 loudspeaker has not as yet been formally submitted for review. (The designer tells us he is still working on the low end.) We auditioned a pair at the one local dealer we could find who had the DQ-10s on demo, and were immensely impressed. Obviously, Jon Dahlquist is on to something that other speaker designers have been overlooking, for, despite the multiplicity of driver speakers in the system, the DQ-10 sounds like one big speaker. There is no awareness of crossovers or separate drivers (except at the low end, about which more subsequently), and the overall sound has a degree of focus and coherence that is surpassed only by the Quad full-range electrostatic, which don't go as low at the bottom or as far out at the top.

This is something we don't see too often: an entirely new approach to power amplifier design. As Quad points out in its literature for the 405, class-A operation of transistors provides the lowest distortion, but drastically limits the amount of power an output transistor can deliver without overheating. (Most transistor amps use class-AB output operation, in which each of a pair of power transistors handles part of each signal cycle and shuts down during the other part. Imperfect synchronism between the two halves causes the familiar "crossover distortion," which accounts for most solid-state sound. In class-A operation, each output transistor draws current though the entirety of each signal cycle, eliminating the crossover transition but doubling the amount of time current is drawn, and thus tending to cause the transistor to heat up more.)

We mentioned in the last issue that we were becoming increasingly disturbed by "a certain manic quality that is creeping into this pursuit of sonic perfection." We were referring then to a manufacturer's announcement of the imminent availability of a speaker system weighing over 1000 lb per channel, but we could just as well have been speaking of this behemoth from Audio Research.

We have still not received a pair of these for formal testing, which may be a good thing in view of our feelings these days about "updatings." (Our feelings about such are clarified in this issue's "As We See It.")

"As We See It" in the Stereophile issue dated Summer 1968 (actually published in 1970) noted the idealistic, glowing claims about how four-channel sound could put you right in the concert hail, but urged readers to wait before buying, to see whether quadrisound would indeed bring higher fidelity. We predicted it wouldn't—that whatever the potential of quadrisound (footnote 1), it would not be used to increase fidelity, but rather to play ring-around-the-rosy with music.