Is It Possible?

  Don't let the prices of the two speakers confuse you. It is how they sound that counts. The Quads are a great speaker. If you like them enough, sell your other speakers or use them in  a second system in your house. 

@michael green.  I was being very sarcastic.  It was a shot against those who believe you need to have the latest greatest thing to get good sound. The longer I spend in the hobby the more I realize that this couldn't possibly be further from the truth. It's definitely related to the similar belief that  you need to spend a ton of money to get good sound. I mean obviously the review were's and advertisers need to convince us of that to sell us the latest most expensive crap.
My speaker system dates from the 60s and when I go to shows I really don't hear anything that I want to replace it with.  I believe one could augment the top and bottom of the quad 63's and have a state of the art world beater. 

I love the sound of the Quad,  just not the look.  Don't get me wrong,  the Scala performs very well on its own,  I am just floored how well the 63s does against it.  I'm glad I was able to picked them up for so cheap.  Now I can enjoy both of them. 

I also was shocked at how good they sound. a good friend has an array of 6 with 3 stacked on top of one another in a custom rack. 3 per side gives a huge room filling experience and with 6 panels they have great bass too. mind you the need for 6 amp channels makes for an expensive ordeal (he has 6 quad amps fully updated). 

Not too surprised by myaudio168’s experience.


It’s not for nothing that so many speaker designers, including those who design dynamic speakers, have held the Quad up as a sort of paradigm for the type of sound they are going for, in terms of midrange transparency.


That said, there’s a reason so many designers aren’t just trying to re-design versions of a Quad. They are great at what they do, but they aren’t the full package in terms of what can be had in reproduced music.


I lived with the Quad 63s for a long time, and also paired them with the Gradient dipole subs made for the 63s (still the best stat/sub pairing coherency I’ve heard). In *some* aspects, despite all the speakers I’ve owned, that may have been some of the best sound I ever owned.


But....as great as the midrange transparency was, I ended up craving more density and palpability. The Quads seemed to cast beautiful sonic images that didn’t really move air, or seem in the same room as me, so it became something of a detached-from-the-music experience for me. I moved on to dynamic speakers and would not go back to the Quads, or any electrostatics. Electrostatics for me are a wonderful place to visit; whenever a pair is around I have to sit and listen. But it’s also immediately apparent that I could never live with one again because the don’t do some fundamentally satisfying aspects of music that I really crave.  (Though I would absolutely LOVE to have a pair of ESL 57s, which I prefer over the 63s, in a second system).


But...yeah...after listening to box speakers and then hearing Quads, it’s hard not to notice that amazing boxless factor in the Quad sound.