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There are few things in life as rewarding as a truly
invigorating live performance from our favourite artist
or orchestra.
Reproducing that experience accurately in the home
requires loudspeakers that go beyond the conventional.
To really understand the ESL, a listener needs to be
familiar with the nature of a live performance. Whilst the
performance may be impressive and communicate all
kinds of emotions, it is never artificial. It sounds real
and natural.
At Quad, we believe this is the job of a loudspeaker.
To present the music in the raw, natural form -
nothing added, nothing taken away. In this respect,
the ESL is an acquired taste. It displays none of the
over-empasized bass boom or mid-range projection
that plagues moving-coil, box-bound speakers - so in
comparison, the ESL can seem rather meek and polite.
The characteristics, however, that can make these box
speakers so impressive, are also those that cause
fatigue and wear down the listener. Spend some time
with the ESL and you too will begin to realise that it’s
not always the one that shouts the loudest that gets
heard.
It is often said of ‘box’ or cabinet mounted loudspeakers
that you can hear more of the box than the driver. This
is true, even with high-end ‘box’ loudspeakers. The box
- no matter how inert - will always colour the sound.
Electrostatic loudspeakers are therefore in a league of
their own in terms of ‘transparency’.
But to get really close to the original sound, a standard
planar electrostatic speaker, needs more. At a live
performance, each sound comes from an identifiable
position on the stage. To reproduce this three-
dimensional sound ‘image’ accurately, we need to
produce an interference pattern upon the listener of
waves propagated from a pair of true point sources - in
much the same way as a laser produces a hologram.
The Quad ESL 988 and 989 speakers are the only
electrostatic speakers in the world to effectively mimic a
point-source.
Five minutes spent listening to a well set-up pair of
Quad ESLs will confirm their ability to project the
positions of each and every vocalist in a choir, and
instrument in an orchestra - with a naturalness and level
of detail that makes the Quad ESL totally unique in
every respect.
‘Quads can deliver a sublime
performance. They still take my breath
away with their profound revelation’
– Hi-Fi World , Noel Keywood
The closest approach...
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