 In this installment of Spotlight we turn our focus to venerated British hi fi manufacturer Quad.
Known best for electrostatic loudspeakers and tube amps, Quad is one of the truly endearing names in high fidelity, with a history that spans seven decades. Today Quad is going as strong as ever, thanks to the relocation of their production facilities to the People's Republic of China, which gives audiophiles a chance to purchase Quad equipment for much less than it would sell for if they didn't have complete control over their manufacturing process. In addition, Quad's expansion into producing dynamic loudspeakers has helped them gain a whole new audience, and the Quad L Series has been universally hailed as an audio success at a breakthrough price.
Quad continues to produce their famous electrostats and valve amps at their Shenzhen production facility, but the company is no less British than it was before, with employees in the UK, and many relocated to the PRC to design and oversee production. It's a business model that has been a resounding success. And with that, let's turn the Spotlight on Quad Hifi:
In 1936 Peter James Walker (1916-2003) founded the Acoustical Manufacturing Company in London, initially with the intent of producing public address systems. The facilities were destroyed in an air raid, and Peter took his production to Huntingdon.
After the war, Peter turned his eye toward the growing high fidelity market. In Peter's own words:
No, I didn't start with manufacturing, that was after. I worked
for a firm selling amplifiers. I sold an amplifier one day for thirty
pounds, and I thought, 'Well, I dunno, the parts here can only cost
five pounds, I could buy these parts, put it together one day and sell
it the next day and make twenty-five pounds, couldn't I?' Very much
better than the less than two pounds a week I was getting at the time.
So I handed in my notice and started.
That was doing public address
though. I was installing a couple of loudspeakers and a microphone in a
dance hall or cinema, which was never very lucrative. We struggled with
that for a number of years. The difficulty there was that you'd got to
produce the maximum number of Watts for the minimum number of pounds,
and if people wanted a really good job they'd go for the big names like
EMI or Standard Telephone. Everything had to be tendered (bid for).
People would either take the cheapest, and the cheapest bloke always
lost money anyway, or they took the most well-known, which we weren't.
We were in the middle.
We started in high fidelity before the war. But
Paul Voigt, when he was in England, was making a much better
loudspeaker than anyone else, but two a week was his maximum sale. It
cost thirty-five pounds, which I suppose in present day terms would be
about six hundred pounds. It was very expensive. But he couldn't do it
on his own because there was no high fidelity market. You've go to have
a lot of people making things, to get the advantage of the group
advertising.
In 1937 or '38 I made a high fidelity amplifier,
push-pull, 25 Watt, triode, direct-coupled, with feedback. Oh yes, very
good. But you couldn't really sell these things, partly because the
records in those days were all 78 with a lot of scratch. People said,
'What's all that frying bacon noise?' The BBC was very good. For the
speakers, we had the voigt, there was also an infinite baffle in those
days, in fact, before the war, we had an acoustic suspension speaker in
the Audiom 8. It had a fundamental resonance in free air of 16Hz., and
was stuck in a three cubic foot box, which forced it to 50 Hz. It was
an acoustic suspension speaker, and that was around 1937 or so. But
again, there wasn't a big sale for this because there wasn't a high
fidelity market.
I went
into hi-fi as a sideline 'til the public learned to like it. You made a
set for yourself; you sold these to a few engineers, about five or six
a week, that sort of thing. Then of course hi-fi came in, mainly with
the LP record, and since we were already in the business one could get
pushed up with it - doing the right thing by luck at the right moment.
This is really what most of these things are about, aren't they?
To distinguish his hi-fi gear from his other product, the acronym Quad (QUality Amplifier Domestic) was introduced. The first product to wear the Quad badge was 1949's QA12 preamplifier, followed by 1951's Quad Tube Power Amplifier, which lead to 1953's introduction of the respected Quad II amplifier.
 Quad had produced a hybrid corner ribbon loudspeaker, but that was only a precursor to a revolution that Quad would unleash in 1956: the Quad Electrostatic Loudspeaker, better known as the ESL-57. The ESL-57 was a virtually massless plastic film suspended between two charged plates. Compared to conventional moving coil designs the ESL was remarkably free of unwanted "additions" to the source in the form of distortion and frequency response. This loudspeaker remained in production, virtually unchanged, for 28 years.
1981 saw Quad offer Walker's improvements (ESL-57 proponents would argue this point) over the original design when the ESL-63 was released. The 63 denotes when Walker first started to put pen to paper on this design, and Walker often joked about the 18 year development cycle of the ESL-63:
It's like the ESL 63 loudspeaker. It took us 18 years to develop but it wasn't 18 years every day. [Laughs] Not at all.
Today Quad is owned by IAG, who also maintains the Wharfedale, Audiolab, Mission, and Castle Acoustics. Production facilities are in Shenzhen, PRC, but Quad also maintains offices in the UK.
Quad enjoys continued success with their tube and solid state electronics, and yes, they still produce their famous electrostats. In addition, Quad has enjoyed glowing reviews from both the hi-fi press and consumers for their L Series of conventional loudspeakers.
Quad has flourished under IAG's stewardship, and continues to offer product that serves music without imparting any additional "personality". Not content to rest on their laurels, Quad has continued to innovate with new designs. Their manufacturing model is practically self-sufficient, with very few components outsourced. Coupled with their location in the People's Republic, Quad is able to offer hi-fi consumers products that compete with much more expensive components.
70+ years of high fidelity. Here's to 70 more.
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