Sealed subwoofer for ESL-63


I am looking for owners who have successfully integrated their QUAD ESL 63s with a subwoofer.

I recently bought a used pair of QUAD ESL63 and had them rebuilt, panels and electronics, this is my third pair. I have had several monkey boxes in between - Aerial 10T, B&W, KEF, IMF, Tannoys, Proac, Goldmund, Falcon Acoustics kits, etc - but the 63s are very hard to live without when you know what they can do.

My problem is that I am particularly fond of large-scale symphonic works such as Wagner’s The Ring , Beethoven, Mahler, Strauss, etc. but the 63s are very special and very frustrating used full range, they have limited bass and dynamics.

I am retired now and have a fixed income so I cannot keep doing what I did for fifty years, buy, experiment, trade and sell.

I would like to keep the cost of the sub to $1K max for a good condition, one owner unit.

Best regards,

f456gt

Let me offer some clarification to my earlier post.

My statement that a dipole has smoother in-room bass is based on a paper written by James M. Kates and published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society in 2002.

It takes the ear a long time to hear low frequencies, relatively speaking. We cannot detect the presence of bass energy from less than one wavelength, and we must hear several cycles (several wavelengths) before we can detect pitch. If you stop and think about how long these wavelengths are, you’ll see that by the time we can hear low frequencies, they have already bounced around our little rooms quite a bit. So the room’s effects are all over the sub’s output by the time we hear it. In other words, perceptually we cannot separate the subwoofer(s) from the room - they form a system, for all practical purposes.

The idea with a distributed multisub system is, each sub inevitably generates a nasty room-interaction peak-and-dip pattern. But because the subs are intelligently scattered, these peak-and-dip patterns are all significantly different. The sum of these multiple dissimilar peak-and-dip patterns is pretty darn smooth, assuming we started out with four subs. This smoothness holds up pretty much throughout the room because at any location within the room, we have the summing of four dissimilar peak-and-dip patterns. And since smooth bass is fast bass (both literally and perceptually), the net result blends very well with dipoles.

Duke

Duke,

I've got a pair of Quad 2805's.  I love pretty much everything about them but I would like a bit more bottom end.  I'm a jazz / funk  guy with the emphasis on jazz.

They are powered by a Primaluna Dialogue premium HP.

What would you recommend for a subwoofer(s) in the 2-3k range?

I live 300 miles from the nearest hi fi store and making the trip to audition usually means an overnight stay.

Thanks in advance,

Bob
Quad Esl 63’s are fast, to mate a sub well to them they have to be fast also. A well designed sealed sub with less than 10" drivers and with motional feedback would be the way to go, 12" or bigger and or ported tend to be slower and harder to mate with ESL’s

There is a sleeper of old that will suit and are very cheap s/h, and that’s believe it or not is a pair of old Yamaha YST-SW160’s or the more powerfull YST-SW305’s. These both use twin 8" drivers are are motional feedback controlled, and use linear amps, even though ported they are very fast and no doof doof sound, IE: accurate and detailed. They don’t go super low, but low enough to concuss the air in the room when needed.

Don’t bother with anything else from Yamaha, it’s all doof doof rubbish. Just the YST-SW160 or YST-SW305

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Yamaha-YST-SW305-Powered-Subwoofer-/152465943812?hash=item237fadad04:g:ngwAAOSwfVpYwUOg

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Yamaha-YST-SW305-Powered-Subwoofer-/272614685088?hash=item3f7919f9a0%3Ag%3AmbYAAOSwSlBY4EN-&nma=true&si=8Ky05RR7e8dObTLZM9O%252FuVNMmLI%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557



Cheers George

Jzzmusician wrote: "I’ve got a pair of Quad 2805’s. I love pretty much everything about them but I would like a bit more bottom end... What would you recommend for a subwoofer(s) in the 2-3k range?"

I’ve owned three pairs of Quads and many pairs of SoundLabs, so I’m somewhat familiar with the superb pitch definition of a good dipole bass system. You can hear every little nuance of what the bass player is doing.

In my opinion, the most promising approaches to adding deeper extension to your Quads are probably four small monopole subs, and two dipole subs. Both approaches have similar smoothness across most of the bass region. Briefly, the more bass sources the better, and each dipole is like two bass sources, from an in-room smoothness standpoint. In both approaches, the bass energy from all these different sources bouncing around the room combines in semi-random phase to produce much smoother response than you’d get from a single sub.

Obviously two dipole subwoofers are gong to blend well with two dipole main speakers. But four small monopole subs, scattered around, have about the same in-room smoothness as two dipoles, so they also blend well with two dipole main speakers.

But there is an important difference:

At the bottom end of the bass region, where the wavelengths typically become quite long in relation to the room’s dimensions, a multiple monopole system would tend to have a rising response, because at these long wavelengths their outputs are effectively combining in-phase. And in-phase combining results in 3 dB more SPL than semi-random-phase combining.

On the other hand, at these long wavelengths, the in-phase and out-of-phase energies of the dipoles will combine to produce a falling response, because they are summing towards complete cancellation.

Neither is ideal. But the little multi-sub system has a trick up its sleeve: You can reverse the polarity of one of the subs! This actually results in smoother response over most of the bass region, and then no fat-sounding hump down at the bottom end of the bass region. Smooth bass is "fast" bass, and the net result is smooth bass that extends lower than a comparable dipole subwoofer system would go. And subjectively, the distributed multisub system has the impact that dipole systems lack. So arguably best-of-both worlds: Articulation and pitch-definition competitive with a good dipole, but with impact too.

Yeah I got a dog in this fight... four small dogs, to be precise. So feel free to take my comments with as many grains of salt as needed.

Duke

dealer/manufacturer/distributed multi-sub guy

Not to be contrary georgehifi, but the Rythmik 8" sub is no faster than their 12" or 15". All the Rythmik subs are servo-feedback designs, with the behavior of the woofers controlled by the s-f circuit. They all sound very similar, the Rythmik designer/owner Brian Ding citing higher spl output from the larger models, but no less sound quality. There are numerous Maggie, QUAD, and other planar speaker owners using Rythmik subs with their speakers.