Solid State Amps for Quad ESL 57?

Hello Dhcod,

That's interesting!
I have two Parasound Halo JC1s but never thought these are good amps also for the Quads ESL
Do you think they are good on the Quad ESL63 too?

The Quads will only take a limited amount of power and can be damaged by over driving. I never had any trouble as I was careful with the volume but one of my customers bought 63s and a Musical Fidelity 270 [100 Watts?] and had to have them repaired 3 times because he constantly over drove them. A big amp is fine used with care.

Never used them with the speakers, but based on Atma-sphere's comments, it is possible that the older Pass Aleph amps might work in terms of the impedance issues mentioned - they are of course very good sounding SS amps, but the matching issue may be handled by the Aleph's output into changing loads, if I rememebr correctly, they worked much like tubes in that sense.

If you really want to use a ss amp. The JC-1s little brother the A21 is much cheaper and sounds excellent on my Innersound Kayas.

Sarcher30, Innersounds are built with lower impedances in an effort to make the speaker more compatible with transistors. The Quad ESL 57 has a peak of more than 50 ohms in the bass; there simply are not a lot of transistor amplifiers that can drive a load like that with any power.

To give you an example, let's try a 200 watt SS amp, which does 400 watts into 4 ohms. Into the Quad, it will be limited to about 30 watts in the bass. OTOH, it will be able to make 500 watts at high frequencies! Its easy to see why people perceive such amplifiers as very bright and no bass when used on the ESL 57.