Quad ESL owners question

Spendor SP-1s. I had my first Quads in 1964 and was a dealer for years. I got my first Spendors about 1970. They are close to being as uncolored as the Quads and have more bass and top. They were designed by an engineer who had worked at the BBC for years[this is also true of the Harbeth]. They have been used as broadcast monitors by most of the large national radio networks in Europe,e.g. England, Germany, Sweden and others. They are available at very reasonable prices on Audiogon, they currently retail for about $5700 and I have seen them for around $800.

I am a former user of Quad 57s and 63s and currently own Apogee Duetta Signatures but the speakers I am listening to now are SP-1s. The S5e is the product of a different design team entirely. I bought Spendor originally because of a review in STUDIO SOUND, a British pro sound mag, which compared the 57s and Spendor BC-1s and found them very similar. This was in 1970. I was a Quad dealer for 15 years and a Spendor dealer for 16 with considerable overlap. Both of them have been in wide use as broadcast monitors[ why the BC-1 was designed] and by classical recording engineers. They share an uncanny ability to get the timbre of the music right. They do not play especially loud or deep but are very accurate. The large speakers mentioned have their own set of virtues but do not sound like the Quad. I confess that any similarity with the Maggies elude me. I have never been able to stand them.

Your loss. Its wonderful to find someone with so refined a taste that he can tolerate only one kind of speaker. I like the Quads, but they have faults of their own. I am amazed that you would have expected the Heil tweeter to sound good. I remember when a store in Chicago sold 14 pair of the original Heil speakers and got every one of them back in trade in a short period. I will call it to your attention that when the European national radio networks stopped using Quads as monitors they replaced them with Spendors. Of course their only concern was fidelity to the original sound , not maintaining their pose as an audio guru.