Solid State Amps for Quad ESL 57?

Hi whart - congrats on getting them set up.

Would be interested in seeing a pic of the room so I can understand what is happening.

I would be willing to go back into audiophile mode if I had the Quad II amps to compare with my Music Reference Rm10. :^)

My 57 room can be seen on my AudioGon virtual system - last pic bottom right.

I guess that means I'm not playing Black Sabbath at full tilt, but life is full of compromises. :)

Come on over and bring your lps.   :^)

They will seduce and hook you with single instruments and female voices which sound like they are at the Microphone. They make the Acoustat sound colored. and veiled. Running them as a vintage second system with selected music is no problem and with many electronics.

The issue comes ....and this day comes for everyone that listens to full range dynamic music .....you want to hear them compete with their main rig.. And this is where everyone discovers it is not plug and play. I think how much success one will have is based solely on how stubborn a personality one is, for making something work and.....is the individual the type to keep good gear and tweak. Or are they a frequent flyer, buying , selling, trading gear like stocks. If the later - the Quad 57 is not for you. It is very difficult to buy, sell, trade your listening space.

Oregonpapa (Frank)- I ran the Quad SS preamp/amps for a time. The amp was the bigger 405 that you needed to insert limiters in so you didn't fry the speakers. They are good candidates IMO and work well for a second vintage system and on some material. The preamp very quirky.

Cheers Chris 

If you watch the Fremer's tour of Audio Research plant, they showed two listening rooms; one with SF Aida's - obvious choice especially since they are owned by the same company, and used mostly for tours, and another in the back with Magnepan 20.7 used by the engineers to help with component selections and optimization. FWIW, the tour video is available online. One data point.

Small Pass .8 class a would be wonderful.

Interview with Peter Walker  
 
Interviewer

"How do you rate the merits of listening tests to instrument tests? "

Peter Walker

"We designed our valve (tube) amplifier, manufactured it, and put it on the
market, and never actually listened to it. In fact, the same applies to the 303 and the 405. People say, "Well that's disgusting, you ought to have listened to it."
However, we do a certain amount of listening tests, but they are for specific
things. We listen to the differential distortion - does a certain thing matter?
You've got to have a listening test to sort out whether it matters. You've got to do tests to sort out whether rumble is likely to overload pickup inputs, or whether very high frequency stuff coming out of the pickup due to record scratch is going to disturb the control unit. But we aren't sitting down listening to Beethoven's Fifth and saying, "That amplifier sounds better, let's change a resistor or two. Oh yes, that's now better still." We never sit down and listen to a music record through an amplifier in the design stage. We listen to funny noises, funny distortions, and see whether these things are going to matter, to get a subjective assessment. But we don't actually listen to program material at all. "