Quad Electroacoustics
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| Private limited company | |
| Industry | Home entertainment equipment manufacturing & distribution |
| Founded | 1936 |
| Headquarters | Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, England |
| Products | Hi-fi equipment |
| Parent | International Audio Group |
| Website | www.quad-hifi.co.uk |
Quad Electroacoustics is a British manufacturer of hi-fi equipment, based in Huntingdon, England.
The company was founded by Peter J. Walker in 1936 in London, and was initially called S.P. Fidelity Sound Systems. In 1936 the name was changed to the Acoustical Manufacturing Co. Ltd. The company moved from London to Huntingdon in 1941 after being bombed out of London in World War II.
The company initially produced only public address equipment but after the war they began to produce equipment designed for use in the home as a result of the rising demand for high quality domestic sound reproduction. Within a few years the company had transitioned almost entirely to manufacturing models for the home audio market.
Peter Walker Quote December 1975 technical paper in ‘Wireless World’ magazine
‘An audio power amplifier is required to produce an output signal that differs from the input signal in magnitude only. It must therefore have occurred to every circuit designer that it should be a simple matter to take a portion of the output, compare it with the input to derive an error signal. It is then only necessary to amplify the error signal and add it to the output in the correct amplitude and phase to cancel completely the distortion of the primary amplifier.’
Peter put this principle into practice using two amplifiers per channel instead of one. The first stage ‘error’ amplifier is low powered but very high quality. The second amplifier is high powered, but of lesser audio high quality. (It’s a lot more difficult to achieve very low distortion in high powered amplifier stages). Peter designed a way to compare the high powered output with the original audio input and derive the required error correction signal which is then injected into the audio path, in such a way that the high power audio output achieves a very low distortion figure, even at very high power levels. This innovative product earned Quad the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement in 1978.
Peter Walker was also attributed with the famous hifi quote "the perfect amplifier is a straight wire with gain" --- the implication being that nothing would be added, and nothing taken away from the signal, just a bigger version of the same thing at one end. It was an aim, a goal, a description of the perfect amplifier - nobody, including Mr. Walker, ever said they'd attained that goal, and even if they did, the chances were that they were severely handicapped by their test equipment at the time.
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Wikipedia