Quad 21L Speakers - Promising, but with a hard to resolve issue

I’ve been through a great number of speakers since my first stereo many decades ago - Dynaco, Epicure, Allison, Celestion, Mirage, and many others. My best speakers are my current Revel M22s. But I’ve never gotten quite the imaging or 3D quality many speak of. My latest search took me to the Quad 21L floor-standers, offered by a local seller.

I’d read good things about this series, and the set was quite striking for a “wood coffin” design - Rosewood and layers of lacquer. The system it was connected to was nicer than my own kit, it sounded good, and I bought it on the spot.

They didn't sound as good as the Revels on a classic Kyocera R-661 tuner/amp, much better in a smaller room driven by a Marantz/Adcom setup. But something was still amiss. So I took out my measurement tools - Minidsp UMIK-1 calibrated microphone, and REW running on my MacBook through a Kyocera R-461. Close-miked, the left Speaker measured reasonably flat (but I’ve measured better), the right anything but. Indeed, there was a prominent suck-out in the 4 kHz to 8 kHz range. I ‘m not talking a few dB, more like a deep V between two plateaus. Bad tweeter maybe?

My first frustration with this English-designed, Made in China speaker was the tight fit of all components. Yes, the drivers are secured by screws, but they're mostly redundant, as they fit into the cutouts by sheer friction, so tight is the fit. With some difficulty, I pulled the tweeter, expecting to find clips so I could remove it and test it in isolation. No such luck, as the wires go straight into the tweeter! So how to remove?

That took me to the woofer, similarly tight, but at least it's wired with clips. Once removed, I traced the tweeter leads into an acoustic foam wrap and found the tweeter's fine leads are *soldered* to much heavier speaker cable. (What's the point of a thick pipe, one asks himself, if it narrows to a skinny pipe?) So I unsoldered one lead, then wired the tweeter directly to the test receiver’s output and ran a signal sweep from 2,500 to 18,000, bypassing the crossover entirely and the response was ..flat! So something is going on in that crossover.

But to diagnose a problem with the crossover, one expects to be able to remove it. And it’s obvious this board was never meant to be removed. It's installed on the back wall, behind some bracing, secured by a few screws. But the input wiring runs down the back to the speaker taps, low on the back wall, with almost no slack. Like the drivers, the back panel is set tight into the cutout, without any screws, and obviously designed to appear seamless. But the downside is obvious. I can't pull it out, thus I can't get to the wiring. If I had a Dremel and a I didn't care about resale value I might try to cut it out, but there's got to be a less drastic way.

It's not possible to EQ my way around the HF response, as the drop is roughly V shaped, and about 20 dB. Maybe the original seller never identified the problem, maybe he did and just lived with it. Maybe I could too, but I’d know it's never right. I could perform “major surgery” on the box, and hope I could put it back together and not ruin it in the process. But it does show how a lack of foresight in design, not taking future maintenance into consideration, can compromise what might otherwise be a nice product.

And Quad? They've been of little help. This is a “discontinued product” after all. And the field service office and its rep, who seems via email to be a sympathetic fellow, hasn't even invited me in so he can take a look at it. And when I questioned the design’s lack of repairability, he insists many fine brands are built this way, because they're built to a price point. That's too facile an explanation, as they set the priorities and their associated costs.

So what do I do in the meantime? Mostly listen through a set of Mirage Omnisats and a modest Aperion subwoofer, trying to decide what to do next. And I've got the Revels in the other room. A pity, as I had great hopes for the Quads.