"Andre Jute"
Jimmy wrote:
Dear Pat,
( ship whole pile of silly nonsense)
Jimmy, that's an interesting idea you have, but it's interesting in the
sense of all wrong. First of all, you strike me as an innocent wandering
down a rough street with your wallet in one hand and your dick in the other.
Normally, in audio this would not matter if you have plenty of money. But in
the case of Quad ESL you're intending to dabble dangerously in irreplaceable
antiques in very limited supply. This is not a sensitive thing to do.
Secondly, you just don't have the knowledge necessary to do the job right.
What you need, if you insist on running with the Joneses, your even more
ignorant pals, is to find some local expert who knows what he's doing (those
will give a guarantee, and pay to fix what they break) to make and maintain
the installation for. I've had ESL, and mine were in no danger, but keeping
yours running in this stacking scheme of yours will be about as expensive as
maintaining a 68ft yacht, which I found akin to standing under a cold shower
tearing up large denomination bills.
Turning from the generalities to the specifics, the QUAD ESL is specifically
a speaker for delivering the classics at realistic volumes. One ESL is
enough to fill a 270 sq ft room at normal orchestral volume; two just
provides stereo and a fractional improvement in sound quality that is far,
far below even the threshhold of perception of someone as cultured as me. To
use an ESL for some unintended purpose which requires multiple ESL, say
playing rock'n'roll very loudly, is barbaric.
In a much larger room, a stack of two ESL per side may be justified,
especially if the ceiling is so high that the stacked ESL may be raised
about head height and then angled onto the listening chair. But why should
you want such a large listening room? ESL give their best to one or two
listeners at a time, not crowds. ESL are not showpiece loudspeakers; they're
speakers for people who have nothing left to prove.
A stack of four ESL, even abstracting from the horrendous drive problems
you've been adequately informed about by the resident experts, will tend to
sound much like an array. If you really need (because your listening room is
huge) or want an array, there are many vastly cheaper and more efficient and
less space-consuming ways of building an array than using ESL. See my
article on Bessel Arrays at
http://www.audio-talk.co.uk/fiultra/...n%20BESSEL.htm
So what it comes down to is that if you're not listening to classical music
or solo voices or the like, ESL are best left to those who can use them
better, and the only time you can use more than two stacked ESL per side is
if your listening room is ostentatiously huge.
Now, about driving ESL. The best and least troublesome ESL drivers are the
current-dumping QUAD amps. If you insist on tubes, the choice way to spend
your money is on sourcing and rebuilding genuine QUAD II and, failing that,
get the copies manufactured by QUAD in recent years, which aren't as good
but close enough for your purposes.
Yes, you can make a SET amp do the business with ESL, including with stacked
ESL, and yes, you can do it with 300Bs. But you really need to know what
you're doing, and you can't go buying commercial amps, you're talking about
custom amps. Go to
http://www.audio-talk.co.uk/fiultra/...0ON%20AMPS.htm
and scroll down to T39-KISS-300B-Ultrafi -- this is a ZNFB WE 300B amp run
so high and hot to flatten the response curve that the output is only 3.8W.
(It's actually the booster or power pre-amp of my 80W ZNFB SET tube amp, but
that one is so dangerous, I'm not sharing the plan any more.) Now imagine
stacking up five or six of these extremely wasteful 300B amps per side to
drive you ESL. Utter madness just about covers it. And the heat all these
tubes will give off will be a bitch to handle, probably requiring a locked,
air-conditioned room all to themselves.
If you give up the ZNFB idea, you can still have SET and tubes, but it will
be pricey because, if you want low NFB, you have to sacrifice power, and
very likely you'll be sacrificing tube longevity too. Whichever way you
turn, you're looking at serious maintenance issues.
In summary then:
If you need multi-stacked ESL, you are misusing the ESL, and you need
different speakers.
You can drive single or stacked ESL with ZNFB SET amps if you can deal with
the heat and don't mind keeping your amplifier technician in luxury for the
rest of his life. It's smarter to use QUAD current dumping silicon amps, and
better to use QUAD II tube amps. Other tube amps that will sound right on
ESL will need to be custom built, and require that you first educate
yourself because otherwise how will you order them built?
Sorry if this sounds like tough love, but you're walking in a minefield and
you're speaking to the survivors who've come out the other side -- and we
can't help shuddering at your naiveté.
Good luck.
** ROTFL !!
Nice one - Andre.
BTW it is perfectly possible to enjoy rock / pop music with one pair of
ESL57s or ESL63s.
Back in the day, my favourite LPs were by people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis
Joplin, Rory Gallagher, Jeff Beck, Fleetwod Mack and Linda Ronstadt.
Lack of dBs was never an issue.
.... Phil