Further EggFest comments (BD-Design)

by James D, Saturday, December 10, 2005, 23:46 (6711 days ago) @ GC

I thought I should add some further observations of the Quasars at EggFest, so here they are:

One thing about the Quasars that really shocks people who think they know open baffles is that they are so strong in the bottom end. In the big hall driven by a 300B or bigger they are concert level loud and are quite explosive at the bottom. The weight of a drum kit really comes across and, of course, they are lightning fast throughout the frequency range. I just love them.

One chap commented that he thought the lower bass sounds came from the lower driver and didn't integrate with the AER, he was sitting about 1.5m from the speaker. I asked him to listen more closely and see if he could exactly hear where the low bass sound came from (like 41Hz E on bass guitar). After about 10 minutes he said 'it's not comming from the driver, it's comming from the floor!' The Quasars really do couple into the room properly and use the floor to lift the bottom end. And I think your filter judgement was good. They seemed a little lean in the mid bass a year ago but they have filled out in the last 12 months :-)

At EggFest they have a huge advantage over all the other speaker types as they are quite happy drving the big room. The huge electrostatics just don't cut it at all. They suffer from peak distortion as they can't produce any decent sound level in the room and the integral sub-woofer is completely discontinous with the panel...

The Ariels sound OK but do not have the speed, resolution, level or tone of the Quasars and just don't put the sound out in the room. They also start to compress and distort at high level.

The Lowthers are nice but not neutral at all - in fact they have a very vintage sound to them as that is how the owner designed them to sound. Interestingly he has moved from a pure back horn into more of a TQWT design by closing off most of the horn mouth and has got a more balanced sound from them.

The next best to the Quasars are the Fe206 in Jericho horns - although these have been worked on - the wizzer has been removed and a coat of C37 added then a Visaton super tweeter added. They are pretty good but still not close to the Quasars...

This makes the Quasars very popular at EggFest because they are so transparent and correct, they show the differences between amplifiers and record players very, very clearly. But they are not fussy. We tried an MP3 player with 128kb/s files and it sounded very nice. The musical performance came through and it was good within its limitations - Clearly not as good as the worst CD player but still nice.

ciao

James

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