Is It Possible?

Not too surprised by myaudio168’s experience.


It’s not for nothing that so many speaker designers, including those who design dynamic speakers, have held the Quad up as a sort of paradigm for the type of sound they are going for, in terms of midrange transparency.


That said, there’s a reason so many designers aren’t just trying to re-design versions of a Quad. They are great at what they do, but they aren’t the full package in terms of what can be had in reproduced music.


I lived with the Quad 63s for a long time, and also paired them with the Gradient dipole subs made for the 63s (still the best stat/sub pairing coherency I’ve heard). In *some* aspects, despite all the speakers I’ve owned, that may have been some of the best sound I ever owned.


But....as great as the midrange transparency was, I ended up craving more density and palpability. The Quads seemed to cast beautiful sonic images that didn’t really move air, or seem in the same room as me, so it became something of a detached-from-the-music experience for me. I moved on to dynamic speakers and would not go back to the Quads, or any electrostatics. Electrostatics for me are a wonderful place to visit; whenever a pair is around I have to sit and listen. But it’s also immediately apparent that I could never live with one again because the don’t do some fundamentally satisfying aspects of music that I really crave.  (Though I would absolutely LOVE to have a pair of ESL 57s, which I prefer over the 63s, in a second system).


But...yeah...after listening to box speakers and then hearing Quads, it’s hard not to notice that amazing boxless factor in the Quad sound.

whart,


Yep I agree.


My desire for the palpability factor would probably lead me toward horns of some sort (though Lowther speakers can have this factor as well).  And in fact I'd love to be able to try some.   Unfortunately horns are just a bad fit in terms of size and requirements for my room, so I don't see it ever happening unfortunately.   I get a very nice sense of palpability from my Thiel 2.7 speakers though.

I do think part of the "shock" of hearing electrostatics like the Quads comes from the utterly boxless quality of the sound.   It does help electrostatics sound very detailed, but I do think that even the perception of transparency detail is somewhat still tied to that boxless quality.


I had been auditioning a number of very resolving dynamic speakers and recently listened to my friend's Martin Logan eletrostatics.  That sense of transparency was great, but I also noted that a number of dynamic speakers seemed at least as revealing of information if not more.