In his June, 2006 "Listening" column, Art Dudley discussed the original Quad ESL loudspeaker, and started to describe the task of refurbishing a 47-year-old pair of them; this month, Art fries a pair of transformers and nearly ruins his new wall oven—but finishes the job nevertheless. Please remember that sharp tools, solder flux fumes, and the high voltages typically present inside an electrostatic loudspeaker can sicken or kill you if you don't proceed with caution, and neither Stereophile nor its parent company, Primedia, can be responsible for the suffering or loss that may befall readers who follow Art's advice. Thank you.
"A few of us felt that we were the proverbial voices in the wilderness for a long time." So writes Gary Jacobson, whose Quad ESL website, is my favorite of the many good ones out there.
Going from being an audio hobbyist to a professional reviewer is like passing kidney stones in an emergency room staffed with Playboy bunnies: Not only can you not have what you want, but you don't even want it anymore. In fact, you begin to consciously associate desire with a blinding pain in your crotch.
Not only is it possible for a thinking person to now and then drastically change his point of view, if for no other reason than the sake of change—if one wishes to prevent self-seriousness and various other forms of mental decay, it's probably an outright must. So it was that I recently began to wonder if everything I know about record players might be wrong.
The Hartleys I wrote about last month may be the loudspeaker drivers that time forgot, but the venerable Lowthers of Sidcup, England, reign supreme as the horseshoe crabs of the loudspeaker world: strange, ungainly things that have scarcely changed since the days when Franz Schmidt and Robert Johnson walked the earth. Literally.
There was once an Englishman named H.A. Hartley, who was a contemporary of H.G. Baerwald, P.G. Voigt, P.K. Turner, and other men whose first two names are lost to us. Hartley was a capable designer and audio theorist, not to mention a gifted lecturer and writer—his literary achievements include a book on astrology (footnote 1), of all things—and he's often credited with coining the expression high fidelity. Most important of all, in 1928 H.A. Hartley teamed up with the aforementioned P.K. Turner to create an audio manufacturing company known as Hartley Products, Ltd. The Hartley company made electronics and loudspeakers, the latter of which included full-range coaxial drivers using energized field coils and, later on, quite powerful permanent magnets—just like their countrymen at Lowther Loudspeakers, Ltd.
I'm beginning to understand why some people enjoy writing about crazy tweaks like electron counseling and magic listening trousers: When an idea is that new, it brings with it the chance for some gifted but heretofore unappreciated journalist to rise through the ranks and describe it to an anxious world. By contrast, when a defeated and baggy old establishment writer sets out to describe a CD player or amplifier, the product is surely the millionth such thing to come down the pike, and before long the readers complain: We used to like you, but you don't try very hard to excite us anymore.
I wish the domestic audio industry of 2005 were more like the pop-music industry of 2005, with its variety, vitality, and ability to reach beyond its boundaries to move people. And its sense of fun, which hi-fi often seems to entirely lack.