Strange beasts

AVForums

Help Support AVForums:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

u235

AVForums Grandmaster
*
Joined
Jun 26, 2010
Messages
2,489
Reaction score
55
Location
Midrand, Gauteng
It seems some of us are interested in the rare, arcane, unusual in vintage kit, so I thought a thread for these might be fun.

Here is my starting contribution, the product of an unholy alliance between Magneplanar and many others (no snake-oil present at the union), namely the Infinity QRS-1D Hybrid System (this text is lifted from eBay, believe it or not. Some pictures there of a very strange beast but I can't seem to copy them):

Back in the late 1970's (1978) that for a very limited period of time, Infinity actually made a product called the Quantum Reference Standard. This was only available for a very limited amount of time but it INSPIRED a whole array of loudspeakers that followed. As the story goes.....the heart of the original QRS was the Strathern Midrange Driver. It is a pseudo-ribbon actually invented in the 1950's, if I recall correctly, and for many years it was manufactured in Northern Ireland. The impedance of the midrange was only 0.55 Ohms so the manufacturer also devised a impedance matching transformer to use with the transducer, making the actual drive impedance of the combined device 8 Ohms. However, Arnie Nudell realized that if you took 3 raw drivers and put them in series you could get a 1.65 Ohm load and that a good high current amplifier could actually drive this load directly without the need for an impedance matching transformer. Eventually he mated 3 of these 2 foot Strathern midrange drivers with 20 Full Line Source EMIT's, that he had manufactured for him by Peerless Loudspeakers of Leominster, Massachusetts (13 facing front and 7 facing the rear), and mated them with a 15 inch woofer thus creating the INFINITY QUANTUM REFERENCE STANDARD soon to be known as the Infinity QRS'. The next part of the story is that Harry Pearson, of Absolute Sound Fame, reviewed the speaker (Issue 13, 1978) and loved the midrange and high frequency components but thought the woofer was too sluggish to be a good mate for the system. It just so happened that at about the same time he was also reviewing the Audio Research / Magnaplanar Tympani 1D loudspeakers. In a moment of true genius he decided to try to mate the midrange high frequency portion of the Infinity QRS loudspeakers with the Bass panels from the Audio Research / Magnaplanar Tympani 1D loudspeakers and the rest is history. Resources were limited at the time but he did figure out that the system sounded the best when BI-AMPED and as a crossover he used for the bi-amplification was the Dalquist DQLP1. If I remember correctly the crossover frequency chosen was about 150 Hz. The combination was an instant success. In many people's opinion this was the first loudspeaker combination ever produced, that even began to approach the sound of LIVE MUSIC. A new name was then COINED for the combination speaker system he just created, and it was called the QRS-1D Hybrid System. Once this happened, things began to move very quickly. Both Infinity and Audio Research / Magnaplanar took their current products off the market and both set about improving the short comings of each. For Infinity this lead to the creation of the INFINITY REFERENCE STANDARDS ( IRS ) and for Audio Research / Magnaplanar this lead to the development of the TYMPANI IV's
 
Top