Achieving High Fidelity Sound

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So the received wisdom goes, and near-massless mylar drivers such as in ESLs do indeed have a huge natural advantage.

But the best dynamic drivers have, in recent years, and with recent technology, caught up. The large Quad ESLs which used to dominate my living room are gone, replaced with a 3-way, 5-driver vertical array set into boxes of conventional appearance and having passive crossovers. And guess what - they objectively beat the Quads at their own game in terms of midrange transparency. I know this because I compared when deciding which to keep.

But IAG, the owner of Quad, will lose little sleep over this revelation. Overcoming the natural advantage of the ESL is possible by throwing a lot of rather serious engineering at the problem, which pushes the heavily-engineered dynamic speaker into a price bracket beyond the ESL. And it is not just the drivers which are significant; the engineering of the enclosure and the crossovers has to be on a similarly advanced level and they all have to work together as a system in order to reach this sort of performance. The structure supporting a mylar film has a much easier job, by comparison. I still believe the Quad ESL to be one of the greatest bargains in music reproduction if one can live with its limitations.

But the point remains that it can be done. It is just a question of "at what price?"

Planar speakers do have a bit of a reputation for needing rather more TLC than conventional speakers, and this was my experience with the Quads (one needing minor repair after 5 years, then both completely refurbished after 10)

And when they need it, it's usually a case of having to send the whole speaker(s) away, for what might be a lengthy period of time. The option of just self-install of a replacement dynamic driver or crossover which might arrive in the post doesn't really exist in this world. These objects are particularly cumbersome to schlep around, having both a large form factor and being very heavy, especially when boxed up. Too big for a typical courier, a furniture-remover or palletised-freight carrier is needed. Or hire a van and self-drive.

My pair awaited their refurbishment for over a year (pandemic-related reasons). IAG's charges were IMO very reasonable for the labour and parts involved, and when they came back they sounded quite wonderful. But due to the delay and also due to the progress in conventional speakers, I sold them.

I regret neither the happy decade I spent listening to the Quads, nor the decision to move on from them.