"Geoff Mackenzie" wrote in message
...
Don't forget some decent speaker cable - opinions are divided on this
group but it does make a difference. Audio Innovations Silver Bi-wire at
£5/metre is good, or if you can run to it Chord Rumour 4 at £20/metre.
I've used both, had the AI stuff originally and upgraded to the Rumour 4
when I got the Arcam AVR250 amp.
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Lots of snips.....
Remember when I bought my Quad ESL63s many moons ago, at the height of the
comics cable controversy.
Mr Walker gave his opinion: "The most important matter when considering
speaker cable is that they should be long enough to reach between the
amplifier and the speakers".
I'm not really a great fan of Quad products through bitter experience,
particularly of their legendary service department, but I do like some of
their definitions - a good amp being "straight wire plus gain".
Oh - and that bit about "all properly designed amplifiers when used within
their operating limits will sound the same" - er, why was the 405 power
amp replaced by the 405/2, with not much in common apart from the cabinet?
GMack
The original 405 didn't provide enough current for anything other than
nominal 8 ohm loads. It struggled a bit even with 4 ohm loads. Given that
a nominal 4 ohm loudspeaker is allowed to go down to 3.2 ohms, and many go
below that, Quad felt they had to provide more current capability, hence the
405/2.
This is entirely consistent with "all properly designed amplifiers when used
within their operating limits will sound the same", the original 405's
operating limits were rather too limiting for real-world loudspeakers,
especially in Europe, which favoured 4 ohms much more than the UK did.
If you take a 405 or 405/2 and use them on, for example, 11-15 ohms LS3/5As,
I would very much doubt there could be any difference in sound, but with,
for example, Mission 770s, which were quite popular at the time, I would
expect the 405 to struggle, whilst the 405/2 would be OK. You may not have
been aware that QUAD published a modification to the 405 which turned it
into a 200w/4ohm mono amplifier by paralleling the two channels. I built a
few of these to use with Mission 770s and KEF 104/2s and they worked very
well.
S.
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