Interview with Quad's Peter Walker in 1978

[DSJR]

I came across this courtesy of the Yahoo Quad group and thought I'd share the link with you all -

http://reocities.com/ResearchTriangl...722/pwint1.txt

Some great home truths in there and possibly a bit of contention as well - the legendary Quad II's were designed and built without being listened to, except for nasty noises in extremis... Can't say I totally agree with it all, but this man was one of the legends, who knew his stuff, and who appeared to have a good and gracious sense of humour. I wish I'd met him, but never got the chance as a proposed factory visit to Quad co-incided with my leaving KJ and moving to the Linn/Naim/Rega dark side in the home counties - dealer visits for grunts like me were then restricted to Glasgow, Salisbury and the very occasional trip to the Southend area

[StanleyB]

the legendary Quad II's were designed and built without being listened to, except for nasty noises in extremis...

Weird, but I use a similar principle in many cases. The reason for that is because familiarity with a musical piece can cause the brains to 'make up' the difference in any perceived missing detail. So it helps to concentrate on what is present but shouldn't be there.

[Marco]

Some great home truths in there and possibly a bit of contention as well - the legendary Quad II's were designed and built without being listened to...

No doubt that Peter Walker knew his stuff as an audio designer, and is to be respected, but the above statement is quite incredible and shows the fallibility, and indeed futile arrogance, of extremist objectivist thinking, in that what measures well will automatically sound superb. Bollocks!!

Well at least I now know why stock Quad IIs, to my ears, sound so 'pipe & slippers' and musically as flat as a witch's tit... I sometimes wonder if, for these people, 'adequate' is considered enough, and striving for true excellence is almost treated with contempt?

Yes, the best kit usually also always measures well (because it conforms to relevant electrical parameters), but what measures well doesn't always sound best (good, perhaps, but not necessarily best), and that's because the most talented audio designers realise that listening (and final voicing by ear), when designing equipment, is every bit as important as measuring - indeed more so!

Hey, at least Peter Walker was honest. If only others were the same. I wonder how much extensive listening to equipment is carried out at similarly objectivist-led companies, such as AVI and Cambridge Audio, or like Quad IIs, is simply churned out with zero subjective assessment as being 'adequate for purpose'?

I don't do 'adequate'.

Marco.

[Welder]

Looks like this one might lead balloon on us

Let’s face it; it wasn’t going to be a big hit on a subjectivist forum was it?
It’s a bit like saying “same class amplifiers having high input impedance, low output impedance, flat frequency response, low distortion, and low noise floor sound exactly the same when operated at matched levels and not driven to clipping.” Well, I mean you’re just not going to make friends here with that sort of talk.
What was interesting in the article was a brief insight into the real world economics of producing audio components for a market. I don’t think there was/is anything unusual in Quads approach to audio component design.

[RobHolt]

Looks like this one might lead balloon on us

Let’s face it; it wasn’t going to be a big hit on a subjectivist forum was it?

Ok I'll bite

Quad did listen to their amplifiers because the designers and many of the Quad staff used them at home in their systems. Many of our cherished recordings spanning perhaps three or more decades were mastered in studios using Quad amplifiers, not to mention many broadcasters. But its true that the II just like the 303 and 405 were never assessed during the design stage using music.
They'll have been assessed using various noise and test tones because Quad held the view that an amplifier has only one primary function, that of ensuring that what appears at the output matches that on the input in all but magnitude at audible frequencies.
That task can be performed just as well with tones as with music because the amplifier simply responds to changes in voltage and current. It cannot tell what is passing through it, music or otherwise.

Liking what comes out of the amplifier is another matter. If the amplifier is technically faithful to the input and you don't like the result, then you don't like the music as recorded or replayed by your source!
If you prefer the music through a different amplifier, that amplifier is altering the signal in some way. I would say that unlike some 'objectivists' I'm all for a bit of manipulation of the signal if it gives a more enjoyable experience. Prefer to do it using EQ though.

Well hopefully I've reflated the balloon if nothing else

Rob

[DSJR]

I think Rob & John are quite correct here and if you add damping factor to the equation, then I currently believe that much of what we hear from different amps can be almost neatly sewn up. Makes a wonderful case for active operation, where the losses in a passive crossover can be bypassed and the amp can drive the speaker coils directly (I don't hold with the view that active crossovers are as bad, because properly designed ones seem pretty transparent to me...

I think Quads approach did go against them in the mid 70's, because although many of the traditional speakers out there had benign loads, there was a new breed coming along that threw established thinking out of the window, had loads that could be quite cruel with all manner of phase and impedance shifts and this meant that a whole new kind of battleship amp was needed to be able to drive them. This culminated in the Apogee ribbon 1 Ohm type loading and giant Krell and Levinson style amps to drive them. A poor old under-cased Quad 405 would have melted under such stress (and many 405's all but did this if rock was played through them at high levels for any length of time..)

Having said that, the Quad 606 was and remains a real goodie, having a naturally musical and sweet tone once warmed up thoroughly - I mean no harshness or "forcing" of the musical signal (and even better with the later descendants I think), almost doubling the power into 4 Ohms and is a doddle to service and update if you wish. Still quite cheap too. You see, I reckon that if many of the pr@t amps had been assessed the way that old Radfords and Quads were, the added harshness in the designs would have been ironed out before being released to market - IMO.....

[Marco]

Lol - I'll get to this later!

Marco.

[Marco]

Hi Rob,

Ok I'll bite

Lol – I’m glad that you have for a change! Don’t be scared to upset the 'resident faithful'. We like lively debates here on AoS!

Quad did listen to their amplifiers because the designers and many of the Quad staff used them at home in their systems.

I’m sure that they did, but it doesn’t mean that such listening influenced the design process, which is what was of concern to me.

Many of our cherished recordings spanning perhaps three or more decades were mastered in studios using Quad amplifiers, not to mention many broadcasters. But its true that the II just like the 303 and 405 were never assessed during the design stage using music.

I suspect that any mastering would’ve been done using the solid-state Quad studio or broadcast amps of the day, and not Quad IIs. Heaven forbid, for the sake of accuracy, if it was the latter!

I have no beef with the 303 or 405, as they are different designs.

However, as far as I’m concerned, you cannot build a 'musically accurate' amplifier (i.e. that whose sound is genuinely musically convincing, since the end goal, after all, is to reproduce realistic and believable sounding instruments and voices, through a hi-fi system, by faithfully replicating, as closely as possible, the musical nuances of the source audio signal), without LISTENING to equipment as well as measuring it, during the design process.

It’s an amplifier’s ability to accurately reproduce those all-important nuances and subtleties, and not simply gloss over them, which to our ears, makes it musically convincing, and separates it from one which is merely accurate, up to a point, at reproducing the source music signal. Quite simply, our ears will readily detect the absence of those nuances, which test apparatus will likely have missed (as I do not believe that we can currently measure ALL that we can genuinely hear in audio), and thus will cause us to feel that the reproduced sound isn't 'real'.

In my view, relevant measurements aside, and taken as a given, only when equipment is then judiciously voiced by ear, by someone who genuinely understands music, and all its inherent complexities, does one faithfully capture those all-important musical nuances (depending on how good the ears are of the designer in question), which I have referred to above, quite simply because the technical limitations of our test equipment results in us currently being unable to measure all that needs measuring with music signals, in order to ascertain, with the sound of equipment, what is actually real (or rather as close to real as possible) and what is merely a competent copy of the source music signal.

As an aside, and I’m sorry to say it, but it pains me to read some of the absolutist stuff that Serge Auckland writes on pfm on this subject. He’s a nice enough chap, undoubtedly, but severely deluded if he genuinely believes that any audio equipment is *genuinely* sonically transparent. If only it were! Incidentally, Serge is most welcome to join and defend his views; in fact I would invite him to do precisely that, as it would no doubt make for an interesting debate, albeit it would most likely end in us agreeing to disagree.

I believe that there is no such thing as (genuinely) sonically transparent audio equipment. In my view, ALL audio equipment imparts its own sonic signature, subtly or otherwise on proceedings, by the very nature of the signal having to pass though a multitude of electronic components, wire and/or PCBs, all of which to some degree affect its integrity, and thus colours the music reproduced by the equipment in question, although none of this is likely to show up on our current test equipment. To be blunt, you’re in cloud cuckoo-land if you think that your favourite amp (or whatever) is sonically transparent...

I mean, let's get real, how can both Quad IIs and, say, the Quad 303 be considered as sonically 'transparent' or 'accurate' when they both sound different?? Yet both were presumably designed by Peter Walker to be "technically faithful to the input", such was his mantra, (and I could cite many examples of the same with equipment from other manufacturers). What's going on there, then?

The answer, of course, is that neither amp qualifies as being genuinely transparent, as every amplifier made to date on this planet, valve or transistor, imparts its own sonic signature on reproduced music, in varying degrees of subtlety. Therefore, when assembling our hi-fi systems, all we can ultimately do is choose our preferred form of coloration, whether it be valve or transistor-derived, and enjoy our music through it on that basis. Genuine transparency in audio equipment is but a pipe dream!

They'll have been assessed using various noise and test tones because Quad held the view that an amplifier has only one primary function, that of ensuring that what appears at the output matches that on the input in all but magnitude at audible frequencies.

That task can be performed just as well with tones as with music because the amplifier simply responds to changes in voltage and current. It cannot tell what is passing through it, music or otherwise.

But a music signal is a very different thing from a noise or test tone signal.

Just because an amplifier ensures that what appears at the output matches that on the input in all but magnitude at audible frequencies, doesn’t automatically mean that it will succeed at accurately reproducing the source music signal.

The goal with music reproduction via audio equipment, after all, is to accurately reproduce MUSIC (not noise or test tones), which is probably why Quad IIs fundamentally fail at the former, and what happens when you don’t actually listen to the equipment you build!

Liking what comes out of the amplifier is another matter. If the amplifier is technically faithful to the input and you don't like the result, then you don't like the music as recorded or replayed by your source!

The problem is that "technically faithful to the input" can, in reality, mean a very different thing to being (genuinely) faithful to the source music signal.....

If you prefer the music through a different amplifier, that amplifier is altering the signal in some way. I would say that unlike some 'objectivists' I'm all for a bit of manipulation of the signal if it gives a more enjoyable experience.

The way I do it is embrace the fact that no piece of audio equipment or system can ever be truly 100% musically transparent or accurate, and simply choose components and build a system, which to my ears, best replicates the sound of real instruments and voices, based on my (extensive) experience of listening to them live. Therefore, from my listening experience to date, I intrinsically *know* how things should sound - and I'm far from alone in being able to do this.

Live, un-amplified, music is the benchmark I use to test my system against, and so I need no 'measurement apparatus', other than my brain and the God-given organs attached to the sides of my head (known as ears) in order to assess whether, on that basis, my system sounds musically convincing.

Well hopefully I've reflated the balloon if nothing else...

Well, if you’ve re-inflated it, I’ve probably just gone and burst it!!

Over to you now, mate....

Marco.

[RobHolt]

I'll get to it later

[Marco]

Marco.