[CJG888]

Fully-restored Quad ESL57s?

 

[jazzwave]

I started with speakers that reproduce voice and other natural sounds well and eventually found that the Etymotic get close to that sound.

I eventually switched to the ER4P since sound in a room tends to slope down from lower to higher frequencies. The ER4S is simply to dry to be realistic for my taste.

I use Harbeth Montitor 40 speakers. The Monitor 30 does not reach as low and is even closer to the Etys.

Cheers

Thomas

 
 
Agree, I love Harberth speakers, cannot comment to comparison with ER4 but Harberth deliver amazing natural sound
 
rgds
~ron~

 

[LIVE_EVIL]

  High-end digital room correction system/loudspeakers would probably come close if you don't already have a very well-damped listening room.
 
Lyngdorf RoomPerfect, Genelec or Meridian. 

 
I stayed with this for a while actually and feed my ProAc 100 through an electronic equalizer . Not as good as lyngdorf etc but still better

Fully-restored Quad ESL57s?

I am wondering this as well. I have a pair of Yamaha NS-1000M and some people say that they are close to 57s and they sure are transparent but NS1000M are still not as good as ER4 . I doubt though that any speaker can compete with ER4s 

 

[jwh9]

I've owned the ER4 a long while, until the cable finally failed recently, anyways. Of all the speakers I've owned (including Maggie's) the ones which remind me most of the balanced (yet extended) and transparent sound of the er4's were the New England Audio Resource 50me's. A criticism of these speakers was 'dry' but I tended to hear that as balanced. I really missed them.. so much so I finally tracked a working pair for $560.. much cheaper than the first time I bought them, haha. Cost me almost as much to ship from New Hamshire to Los Angeles.

Drivers were proprietary and had no spiders, only ferrofluid to center the cone, and this made them fussy. You sometimes (once a week) had to carefully manually realign the ceramic oxide aluminum cones of the woofers w fingers to have them be perfectly centered otherwise they'd rattle a little.. but ironically not something I've had to do with my last pair.. which are about 20 years old. To this day they are my main speakers. A pair of large and sweeter sounding Von Scweikert's are in boxes, which while nice to listen to, just sounded colored to me. I could not hear upstream component changes with these or the Maggie's like I could with the NEAR's.

But am a big fan of the Ety ER4.. and NEAR 50's.. for the same reasons. You can pry them from my cold dead hands... etc etc.