People, including my speaker savant buddy, told me for a very, very long time the Quad ESL57s represented the antithesis of my sort of sound. People consider me a head banger, with a serious penchant for volume and some battleship gun low frequencies.
Wanted to hear them for a very long time due to the supposed otherworldly synergy with OTL amplifiers, which I used to favor, along with that famed speed, openness, and clarity. Had a couple of opportunities to try them, but they evaporated whenever I went for it. Fast forward a few years later, and Robin Wyatt pairs the ESL57s with Miyajima OTL amps at the NY Audio Show, and I hear a sense of sheer palpability, naturalness, and ultimate realness I couldn't remember ever experiencing in many years of audio.
Well, here I am the proud owner of a pair of ESL57. Folks knocked them for decades for the lack of volume and low frequencies, everyone knows that. EVERY loudspeaker, indeed EVERY audio component is flawed. Now, if me listening to them at 95 dB at the listening chair represents a loudness handicap, so be it. True, they don't deliver blow you back or sledgehammer bass, but they go down to 40 Hz, and how many loudspeakers actually do the bottom octave correctly? What the Quads do is sound more like real life and real music than any other loudspeaker ever created.
For what it's worth, I've spent a lot of time with the ESL63 and the iterations thereafter. Just don't do it for me. As The Doctor labeled it, pipe and slippers sound
Wanted to hear them for a very long time due to the supposed otherworldly synergy with OTL amplifiers, which I used to favor, along with that famed speed, openness, and clarity. Had a couple of opportunities to try them, but they evaporated whenever I went for it. Fast forward a few years later, and Robin Wyatt pairs the ESL57s with Miyajima OTL amps at the NY Audio Show, and I hear a sense of sheer palpability, naturalness, and ultimate realness I couldn't remember ever experiencing in many years of audio.
Well, here I am the proud owner of a pair of ESL57. Folks knocked them for decades for the lack of volume and low frequencies, everyone knows that. EVERY loudspeaker, indeed EVERY audio component is flawed. Now, if me listening to them at 95 dB at the listening chair represents a loudness handicap, so be it. True, they don't deliver blow you back or sledgehammer bass, but they go down to 40 Hz, and how many loudspeakers actually do the bottom octave correctly? What the Quads do is sound more like real life and real music than any other loudspeaker ever created.
For what it's worth, I've spent a lot of time with the ESL63 and the iterations thereafter. Just don't do it for me. As The Doctor labeled it, pipe and slippers sound