My Personal View on the QUAD 11L British Standmount Loudspeaker…

I had been meaning to write a follow-up about the audio-technica AT6099, but a regular reader, Mr U, sent in several questions about getting the most out of the British bookshelf speaker QUAD 11L, so I found myself going round and round in circles with my rather limited knowledge on the subject.

On a certain online forum these past few days, QUAD 11L owners have been engaged in quite a lively debate, and it seems many of them are struggling considerably with harshness in the high frequencies. (The discussion has been moving in a genuinely productive direction, with quite a few comments that really cut to the heart of the matter — I was rather moved by it. I personally think this very tendency is proof that the 11L is fundamentally a good speaker.)

A Speaker Full of British Character — the Traditional European Tone

The QUAD 11L has been listed as a recommended speaker in the under-£1,000 class on this blog since its early days, ever since Baba Denki, a shop I am indebted to, suggested I give it a listen. When the forum was active, it seems a number of people bought the QUAD 11L having partly referred to this blog, and I confess the current situation makes me feel a certain degree of responsibility. That said, I myself have only auditioned the 11L two or three times in a shop and have never actually purchased one — and since I have not taken the risk of being an early adopter with a unit of my own, I am hardly in a position to lecture anyone authoritatively about how to get the best from the real thing. Please bear that in mind, and take everything below with a generous pinch of salt. m(__)m

The appeal of the QUAD 11L’s sound, as I hear it, lies in the combination of a European tone with a slightly old-fashioned British flavour — warm and somewhat analogue in character, retaining a certain unpolished roughness that, put less kindly, could be called a lack of sophistication — and yet, alongside that, a wide-range, high-speed response capable of handling modern source material, together with a delicacy in the high frequencies that faintly recalls the company’s own electrostatic speaker, the QUAD ESL.

That should give some sense of what to expect — but precisely because the tonal character is, in a sense, quintessentially foreign, I am not sure it can be lightly recommended as an all-purpose speaker to those who are not particularly drawn to that kind of imported sensibility (note: this includes cases where the listener’s musical taste differs). QUAD’s sound is quite a different direction from what Japanese listeners tend to think of as “high fidelity.” As someone somewhere once put it, it is rather like Royal Milk Tea from a certain well-known brand — not the clean, refreshing green tea variety. A sound you will either love or leave, depending on how much you appreciate the Western flavour. (And for my part, I happen to love it.)

First, the harshness in the treble. I noticed this myself during my auditions. It is not so much that the very top end is harsh — in my description it would be more the upper midrange — but sibilants on vocals stand out in a peculiar way, and there is a tendency for the upper registers of musical tones (the upper midrange in terms of frequency response) to grate on the nerves. My own interpretation at the time was that this shared a certain potential with speakers a few classes above — such as B&W, Vienna Acoustics (with Scan-Speak tweeters), DYNAUDIO, Red Rose Music, and various ribbon-tweeter designs — speakers capable of the subtle resolution and spatial imaging that classical music demands. I received those characteristics as a sign of good breeding, indicating that this speaker harbours similar high-frequency potential to those more serious designs. During brief auditions, I chose to take it as a positive. In real-world use, however, I did sense that it might, depending on circumstances, present difficulties in terms of system matching and optimisation.

Whether that tendency during auditioning was purely a matter of amplifier compatibility I genuinely cannot say, but the amplifiers being used at the time were mid-class Japanese domestic models from DENON, MARANTZ, and LUXMAN — what I’d call the high-powered tank category — and I was telling myself it was simply a matter of poor matching, the amplifier driving it into a kind of overdrive distortion. Even so, inwardly I was rather alarmed.

I cannot say definitively whether this problem is entirely down to amplifier matching, but it also struck me that, in the 11L’s case, the crossover sits at an unusually low 2,200 Hz, which may be producing a tonal inconsistency or colouration in the upper midrange of musical tones. Speakers with crossover points in the 2–3 kHz region do tend to make the join in that vicinity noticeable, and personally I feel that, ideally, a crossover of 4,000 Hz or above — high enough for the woofer to handle virtually all the fundamental tones of piano and full orchestra on its own — would be preferable. (The Vienna Acoustics T-2 also has a well-documented problem right around its crossover point of 2.8 kHz.)

Perhaps it reflects an ambition to achieve ESL-like delicacy from a low-cost dynamic bookshelf speaker — but because the tweeter is being asked to handle frequencies down into the lower registers of musical tones, surely the result is that any failure to properly control the tweeter will lead to high-frequency distortion rather easily?

Below are a few ideas I have been able to think of for addressing the problem of harshness in the treble.

Unit-to-Unit Variation and Driver Fitting

First, unit-to-unit variation. Regrettably, there is nothing to be done about this — not just with the 11L, but with any speaker. Speakers are in some respects close to handcrafted objects, and anyone who has had the chance to compare different production batches of the same model will know that the variation between a good and a bad sample can be greater than one might expect. With the 11L in particular, the finish of the veneer apparently makes a noticeable difference to the sound as well — the ebony finish, for instance, is said to produce a sharper, tighter sound, which may well make the harshness more pronounced. That said, a good specimen in ebony would probably be the finest-sounding of the lot, precisely for that tightness and resonance.

Another thing worth trying: if the driver unit was distorted during assembly by an electric screwdriver (over-tightening is common), removing it and re-fitting it by hand with an appropriate torque can sometimes produce a dramatic improvement. In my own T-2, the tweeter was so distorted-sounding when I first bought it that I could barely listen to it — but after taking the plunge and removing and re-fitting it, the distortion vanished as if it had never existed. And yet, before I tried that, simply loosening or re-tightening the screws slightly had made barely any difference at all. It should be noted, though, that removing and refitting a driver unit will definitely change the sound one way or another (to a degree comparable to unit-to-unit variation). In some cases the result may not be to your taste, so there is an element of irreversible risk involved. I cannot accept any responsibility for the outcome, so please proceed entirely at your own risk.
Note: If you have no major complaints about the current sound, please do not attempt this. If you find yourself unable to listen for more than a few minutes, or you are on the verge of putting the speaker up for sale, then it may well be worth trying as a last resort.

An Allen key for removing driver units can be found at a ¥100 shop, but QUAD uses Torx (hexalobular) screws, which are common on British products. These are usually stocked at larger home improvement shops or major car accessory retailers, but they are not generally easy to find cheaply, so I will mention the one I use here.

The Difference Between the 11L and 12L

The QUAD 12L, being a size larger, has a more relaxed, unhurried sound to go with its greater dimensions. However, I personally feel that the 11L has considerably more musicality. Above all, it has a liveliness and a joy in music-making that the 12L cannot match. On the other hand, being the smaller of the two, it trades sharpness for something that occasionally feels a little cramped in its presentation — one could perhaps say it maintains its balance right on the edge of tipping into harshness. As a result, the 12L may ultimately be the easier speaker to drive, with a more natural sense of ease about it.

Amplifier Matching

With the popular high-output Japanese domestic amplifiers, I found in most cases a distorted, congested impression as if everything were being slightly overdriven. It may be an impractical suggestion, but I think the QUAD 11L is better served by amplifiers that give no sense of distortion from the component itself — either a genuinely high-precision, high-quality high-end amplifier of modest output, or the matching QUAD 77, or British and European alternatives such as CREEK, Naim Audio, or entry-level models from Unison Research or PRIMARE — amplifiers that treat the speaker gently, with care for resonance and purity. If a Japanese domestic amplifier is preferred, then something at entry level with quite low power (around 50–80W into 8Ω) might suit, or perhaps a well-chosen valve amplifier. This is, after all, not a speaker for cranking up to high volumes and revelling in sheer loudness — and I would say that applies to QUAD speakers across the board.

Speaker Cable

As with the amplifier, the choice is either to accept a compromise — taming the treble by deliberately using a cheap, bandwidth-limited cable — or to use something truly high quality. Mid-range cables that hype the treble or exaggerate something for effect, designed with popular appeal in mind, are best avoided. As a rather irresponsible suggestion, if budget does not stretch to expensive cable, one option worth trying might be the IXOS 6002/6003 “SUPER GAMMA” in bi-wire configuration — a British brand, like QUAD itself. IXOS‘s budget cables share QUAD’s British tone — a slightly sweet, musically nuanced sound that does not reach for more bandwidth than necessary — and using them might bring a gentler, more agreeable treble while adding to the overall British atmosphere. ⇒ IXOS — Britain’s leading Hi-Fi accessory brand. Staying with British connections, QED and THE CHORD COMPANY would also be candidates — though very expensive speaker cables tend to have a strong wide-range character and may let too much treble through, so if the aim is to reduce high-frequency distortion, it seems advisable to choose a cable that is structurally multi-stranded with a large total number of conductors and a good overall gauge, and that is reasonably flexible to handle.

Hi-Fi Insulators

I was asked about the audio-technica AT6099 — but honestly, you would not know until you try it. What I can say is that with the Audio Pro Image 11, there is a tendency to round off a sharp-edged treble in a useful way, which works well. With the 11L, though, I suspect the effect would be noticeable but ultimately still not quite enough. The fact that the speaker already comes with rubber feet as standard makes me wonder, in a slightly suspicious frame of mind, whether the manufacturer was already aware from the outset that poor placement would make it prone to sounding distorted.

One approach worth considering is using synthetic quartz-based insulators such as those from Audio Replas — these may remove the distorted quality from the treble and add a floating, delicate sense of reverberation, nudging the tonal character further towards an electrostatic sound. However, it should be noted that quartz insulators come with trade-offs: density, rhythmic drive, and richness of colour tend to be sacrificed in exchange.

Radio Wave Cut (RADIO.WAVE.CUT)

The Radio Wave Cut is an original product from Goto Sogo Onkyo (MP Corporation), and Mr U mentioned earlier was full of praise for it on the QUAD 11L. Having tried it myself, I find it genuinely effective at removing tweeter distortion in the treble on many speakers. It is well worth trying not only on the 11L but also when you want a quick fix for the kind of sharp, grating treble you get from B&W and similar speakers. I am currently using it on the main system here, the Vienna Acoustics Mozart T-2. The only thing I would say is that it is, how shall I put it, a touch on the expensive side.

ISOCLEAN POWER FUSE

The effect of changing a fuse is similar in nature to the kind of changes you get from working on the mains supply side — wall sockets, power strips, and so on. My impression of fitting the ISOCLEAN POWER FUSE in a integrated amplifier was that the restless, grainy distortion coming from the component itself, along with the excessive extension in the upper midrange, were considerably improved. However, perhaps due to the gold plating, the character takes on something of a valve amplifier quality — so if that particular tone is not to your liking, then I am afraid that is that. ⇒ Replacing the fuse in an integrated amplifier

An Oversensitive Tweeter That Ultimately Makes the Speaker Difficult to Control

Once a proper run-in period has passed and everything is set up well, you can get a delicate, clear sound that recalls the ESL — but the number of owners who can actually get there is limited by the constraints of their own equipment. The question is whether to fall for the QUAD 11L and pursue its potential to the limit regardless of cost, treating it like a high-end speaker, or to deliberately use lo-fi accessories to narrow the bandwidth, round off the treble, and make a practical compromise. In the end, despite appearances as an accessible, mass-market product, it demands a mid-to-high-end approach to get the best out of it — and that, I think, is precisely what divides opinion about it as a practical choice at its price point.

That said, turning it around, the QUAD 11L and 12L offer a genuinely serious sound at this price level that very little else can match — and in terms of both musicality and the deeper pleasures of Hi-Fi, I personally feel they are among the rare few speakers in this class that have the mature character and the depth to reward a long-term relationship.

The above is a modest attempt to gather together what I have been able to think of. I hope it may be of some small help to owners of the QUAD 11L and 12L. m(__)m