303 Love

摘要

Aaah, if only every manufacturer had this dilemma - too many classics in its CV! With Quad, do you think first of the original ESL or the ESL63? The Quad 22/11? Or do you picture Quad's biggest-selling pre-amp ever and its second-best-selling power amp, the 33/303 combination? For those of a certain age, who arrived on the hi-fi scene after 1967 but before the dawn of CD, that was the heart of a Quad system, and for many of them, it was the introduction to the UK's most venerable brand. (And of course, they aspired to add the beautiful FM3 tuner, seen with the 33 above.) By the mid-1960s, the transistor had made such broad inroads into audio that even valve diehards like Quad, Mclntosh, Leak and Radford were having to produce both. As Gordon Hill recalled in the book Quad - The Closest Approach: 'Quad was one of the last audio manufacturers to introduce a transistor amplifier... Many famous names were early adopters and they were a commercial, if not an audiophile success. The original Leak Stereo 30 is one such example. 'In many ways Quad had built a rod for its own back. Prevailing transistor amplifiers had neither the power response nor the stability to drive the ESL-57 satisfactorily and the world at large would just have to wait if the remarkable qualities of this speaker were not to be thrown away by an unsuitable design.'