It was the spring of 1982. John Crabbe, then editor of the British magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review, and I had driven up to Quad's factory in Huntingdon, England. The ESL-63 electrostatic loudspeaker had been launched the previous summer, and we were to interview its designer, Peter J. Walker, for an article that would appear in the July 1982 issue of HFN/RR. Peter set up a pair of ESL-63s on wooden kitchen chairs, fed one of them a 300Hz…
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I gasped. An almost perfect 300Hz squarewave had appeared on the oscilloscope screen—something I had never before seen from a loudspeaker.
Once the ESL-2805 has been plugged into the wall, a rocker switch turns on the AC power. A rotary control above the binding posts allows the illumination level of the Quad logo at the base of the panel to be adjusted. The ESL-2805 may be made in China, but its overall fit'n'finish is both superb and superior to my decades-old memory of the original ESL-63. A nice touch is the inclusion, with each pair of speakers, of a copy of the coffee-table book Quad: The Closest Approach, by Ken Kessler.
Super Sonics
Setting up the Quad Reference ESL-2805s in my room was straightforward, with…
I included the dual-mono pink-noise track on Editor's Choice because it provides an unambiguous means of testing a pair of speakers' ability to image. With amplitude-stereo recordings—99.99% of all stereo recordings ever made—the pink noise should sound like an infinitely narrow slice of sound placed precisely midway between the speakers. This almost never happens. Room reflections, speaker-cabinet resonances, and speaker coloration and balance problems broaden the image at some if not all frequencies—and with some pathological examples, at some frequencies you don't get a narrowly defined…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Full-range, floorstanding, electrostatic loudspeaker. Membrane: ultra-low-mass (0.5gm), tensioned, split into 4 elements. Frequency response: 37Hz–21kHz, –6dB. Sensitivity: 86dB/2.83V/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms (4–15 ohms variation). Rated input level: 10V; program peak for undistorted output, 40V; permitted peak input, 55V. Distortion at 100dB at 1m: 1.0%, 50–100Hz; 0.5%, 100Hz–1kHz; 0.15%, >1kHz. Operating supply voltages: 110–120V AC; 220–240V AC.
Dimensions: 41" (1040mm) H (plus feet) by 27.4" (695mm) W by 15.2" (385mm) D. Weight: 76.6…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital Sources: Ayre Acoustics C-5xeMP & DX-5 universal players; Apple G4 Mac mini running OS10.5.8, iTunes 10, Pure Music 1.83; Shuttle PC with Lynx AES16 soundcard & dual-core AMD Athlon processor running Windows 7, Foobar 2000, Adobe Audition 3.0; dCS Debussy, Logitech Transporter, Mark Levinson No.30.6 D/A converters; Empirical Audio Off-Ramp4 USB-S/PDIF converter.
Preamplifiers: Classé CP-800, Ayre Acoustics K-5xeMP.
Power Amplifiers: Classé CT-M600, Lamm M1.2 Reference, MBL Reference 9007 (all monoblocks).
Loudspeakers: BBC LS3/…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I used DRA Labs' MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Quad Reference ESL-2805's frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and spatially averaged room responses. The measuring microphone was placed pointing toward the center of the diaphragm, which, with the 3° tiltback, was on the listening axis in my room. Although I raised the speaker off the ground for the acoustic measurements, I couldn't get it high enough to avoid the early reflection from the floor. This limited the resolution of the…
My review of Neneh Cherry and The Thing’s upcoming album, The Cherry Thing, is scheduled to appear in our August issue. Last month, we heard the band’s version of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream.” Now we can check out the video for “Accordion,” a selection taken from MF Doom and Madlib’s 2004 album, Madvillainy.
Director Ted Says explains the video’s creepy look and feel: “We wanted to create an atmosphere that would sit well with the unpredictable music of The Thing and be playful yet creepy. I didn’t want to restrict Neneh too much either—she had to have a platform to do…
Nicolas Jaar: "Love You Gotta Lose Again"
Actress: R.I.P.
Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972
Zomby: Where Were You in '92?
Nicolas Jaar: "Don't Break My Love"
Jay-Z: Decoded
The Wire, The Fader, The Stereophile
Actress: R.I.P.
Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972
Zomby: Where Were You in '92?
Nicolas Jaar: "Don't Break My Love"
Jay-Z: Decoded
The Wire, The Fader, The Stereophile
Eric Chenaux, at Casa del Popolo, Montreal, performing "Put In Music" from the beautiful album, Guitar & Voice.
The album is available now from the kind people at Constellation Records and Secretly Canadian Distribution.
Just the other evening, a friend, co–worker and fellow old record enthusiast, Brian Laboe, and I were saddled up at our neighborhood watering hole, sipping overpriced craft beer and talking about funk bands from the 70’s which happens to be a passion we share. Zapp and Faze–O came up along with Ohio Players, Funkadelic and Cameo. Upon getting home, I put on the new Papa Grows Funk album, Needle in the Groove, and there, fresh from New Orleans in 2012, was a 70’s funk record, one that both celebrates the form and pushes it forward. This being the beginning of the second weekend of Jazzfest (i.…