Quad Series II – Sold
The next set of components will be from the famous brand Quad from Peter Walker. I always liked the chassis design of the well known tube power amplifiers called Quad II as the most advanced of all brands. Simple, straight and without any a abundance of parts, these amps are ridiculous small without any compromise ind technical design, comparing them to other brands. They show up with a smoothing choke, well calculated transformers for power and output and well designed housings for all of them. Other brands normally used bell caps instead closed covers.
The dedicated preamps Quad 22 are a milestone in casing design and functionality. Control about filterloops, bass and treble energy, balance and volume and pluggable equalizer filters for phono and tape were oriented at professional studio equipment instead of home audio products. Together with their legendary electrostatic speaker system ESL 57 these sets set the pace for refinement and resolution of recorded audio response in the mid 1950ties. The Company did sell really a whole lot of these sets until the late 1960ties because of its well named reputation, so there are still a lot of these units in use still today. But to be honest, these components are incredible nice designed, but their paints were not on par with other brands. All my Quad components from all series like series II, III and IV show after several years of use (sunshine, humidity, etc.) hefty discolorations and paint chipped offs. You will see below. The Series II is a single layer gray metal paint without protective clear lacker coating, that shows up with some of them with decent rust blisters. So as well my set is far from perfect, it shows its age but it can be a lot worse than this pair.
Still almost everything is original, only the RCA sockets have been added for better compatibility. Here showed with cloth isolated ac-wires to match their original two contact (earth-free) Bulgin plugs (I have added a separate earthpath which connects to one contact of the Johnson-socket. The tubes are in working condition, but the GEC KT66 are dead and are given just for optical originality. Included is a quartet of very well sounding Russian NOS 5881 long live types. The Mullard EF 86 measure good as the GZ 32 do.
Inside the amps are in pristine condition, restored with the best components available, like Jensen paper in oil caps and Beyschlag carbon composition resistors.
My set contains an original dedicated Quad 22 Stereo Control Unit with their typical connecting wires to the Johnson Connectors at power units, so the preamp is supplied by them. Included are as well two pluggable filter units for phono (MM) and tape equalization. The Control Unit is complete but untested and comes as I got it 30 years ago from a London dealer. The cosmetic condition is fair and can be verified through these images.
The second unit ist the Quad FM 2 mono tuner in quite poor cosmetic condition, technically untested. Both units are included for complement. Both units should be seen as base for restoration.
I own as well a pair of ESL 57 electrostatic speakers. These I do own since 30 years, back in this time I did use them the last. I don't have any idea about their functionality, but normally I would expect the power unit will need new capacitors as some of the foils might need some attention? I do not know and actually I am not able to test them, so I would give these free to a new owner of the Quad II/2/22 units if picked up here. No way to ship them, simply too large.
Quad Series III
The successor of these famous Series II is the logically called Series III. With the first transistorized amp series from Quad, called Quad 303/33/FM3 Peter Walker approached end of the 1960ties again a design masterpiece. Again presented in tiny cases with orange-ivory-brown keys, knobs switches the new series was on top of this time. The Series III was still dedicated to the famous ESL 53 speaker, so the 303 power amp was technically designed to supply the high current requirements of this speaker type.
Both units are untested and show cosmetically aging and on top some resting spots. These come with ac cords to connect the smaller 5-pin Bulgin mains plug to EU mains.
The Quad Series III introduced first the in Britain so popular 5-pin-DIN-sockets, as well for the preamp unit different filter boards were available to match different pickups and tape equalizing preferences.
Quad Series IV
From this successor series four I only own the extremely nice tuner, which I used over the whole period of the 1980 years in my setup. The Quad FM 4 tuner introduced station preset buttons and a numerically frequency display. Even the Series 4 was housed in quite small sized cabinets with exceptional well designed technology built in. I always liked the typical simplicity of this excellent tuner, in particular comparing it to the typical japanese "all you can get"- concepts with tausend functions as sales argument from big brands.
Within the end of the 90ties I got off listening to FM broadcast, so the tuner went into storage for 18 years. As everybody might expect, such a disuse is not very healthy for several components build in. So electrolytic caps dry out, batteries defunction soon and other oxidations might occur further. When I switches last year this unit first time after all this period, almost nothing happened at all. So I decided to give it a complete refurbish. I exchanged all 56 capacitors on the board, some resistors went out of tolerance and the cell battery type needed to be exchanged. It was a nightmare to find in Britain an original spare part but, I was happy. A lot of work spend on this tuner it now works flawless like new again and will give perfect service for another 25 years. The unit has some small chips in the paint and a slightly surface detoriation on the top case, nothing not to be seen in the images, – the unit looks still very good.
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