In article , Rob
wrote:
*If* I was to consider ESLs could any of you sum up, in a couple of
lines, the sort of amplification and room sizes necessary to help them
(say 63s) work properly?
Except for the ealiest issue boards the 63 is a much easier load than the
57. Hence ultra-high currents are not normally required. The speakers also
have protection circuits that may cut in somewhere above about 50V. Hence
in the most basic terms the nominal requirement is for an amp that can
manage about 100-150Wpc into 8 Ohm loads and would be happy with 4 Ohm
loads.
In theory, the amp might have to endure the corwbar protection in the
speakers being triggered. This shoves a 'short' across the terminals and
would mean the amp should have either good fusing or a current limiter.
However despite this I've used a 200Wpc monster with no current limiters
with a pair of 63's for 20 years and never had a problem.
The conventional wisdom is that you need a reasonably large room. However
both the rooms I use I would say are 'small'. Yet I get results which sound
good to me. I think that a more relaistic requirement here is that the
speakers need to be as far from the back walls as possible. Certainly at
least 1 metre away, and more is better. The listening position also being
well away from the back walls.
In a small room this also tends to imply you have to angle the speakers to
get the axis up near your ears. I found that stands were also a good idea.
However all these things are really a matter of experiment as the optimum
will probably vary a lot from one room to another.
I've only ever heard Quad electrostatics twice - once in a hifi 'shop'
(the old Laskey's in Birmingham, a huge room), and once at someone's
home. In the shop the music sounded superb, as good as I've heard, but
at this bloke's house I found it very 'thin' - inoffensive but lacking
detail and weight at frequency extremes. The room was probably 25'x15',
and we were about 15' from the speakers. I didn't recognise any of the
kit, but he was very rich - I'd guess it was 'decent'.
The 63's can easily sound 'light' on bass. To some extent this can be
adjusted by careful positioning, etc. However I also found that there were
two ways to counter this.
1) To use a Quad 34 with a modified bass lift control. Or some equivalent
of this. This then helped get a flatter response down to a lower frequency.
Without this the response tends to fall away somewhere around 60Hz. With
it, you can extend down towards about 35-40Hz
or
2) Simply buy a subwoofer and use this to fill in below 50Hz or so. This
can fill in nicely down to 20Hz if so desired.
(1) tends to give a nice result, but restricts the power level you can use
a bit, depending on the music and room size. Snag is the need to modify the
34, or make up a suitable 'shelf' filter to go between preamp and power
amp.
(2) goes deeper and gives more power at LF, but is more tricky in terms of
getting the 'match' right. Now that I use 988's + sub I find that this
gives good results on music and the required 'thuds and bangs' for films.
Any apparent lack at HF can be a result of either not being on-axis, or
missing the colourations of conventional tweeters. Also of a difference in
the levels of room excitations as conventional speakers do this differently
to the ESLs. FWIW although the sound can change when you listen to the
ESLs, I'd say that once you have listened to them for a while you tend to
end up feeling that the ESL is 'right' and the conventional speakers are
'wrong' - although this is obvious subject to my bias. ;- Also depends
on how the music was balanced when recorded.
Slainte,
Jim#
--
Electronics
http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Audio Misc
http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/AudioMisc/index.html
Armstrong Audio
http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/Audio/armstrong.html
Barbirolli Soc.
http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/JBSoc/JBSoc.html
Quad Electrostatics
)
Linear Mode
