Quad

The world-famous Quad 99 series of products has been revamped with improved cosmetics, circuitry, and critical parts quality to yield the new Elite series of electronics. The new lineup consists of the Elite preamplifier at $1300, the Elite stereo power amplifier at $1150, the Elite mono-block power amplifiers at $1100 each or $2200 per pair, the Elite CDS CD player at $1200, and the Elite CDP CD player at $1750.

Quad has always stood for solid engineering that gives superior sound quality through innovative methods. Through a long history of ground-breaking products, Quad has brought beautiful music to the most discerning customers. The Elite series represents an evolution of the QUAD ethic by making available completely reworked products that use new technology and techniques to improve music reproduction.

While the new Elite series has far more appealing cosmetics than the 99 series, the main focus for the new designs was to improve sonic performance through improved circuitry and better parts. The Elite's internal designs have taken the traditional QUAD sound and have refined it to a new level. All the products have greater dynamics and resolution, and increased transparency has made musical lines far easier to follow. The music and musicianship of the performers become predominant, allowing the listener to revel in the performance. This is achieved through careful selection of quality components in key places, ensuring proper balance and resolution. Closely-matched components guarantee consistency and neutrality, and, most of all, the design of the circuitry concentrates on passing the music through untouched.

The CD players use a top-of-the-range Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) and an extremely short signal path. More importantly, a high quality clock ensures that the data is converted accurately to analog, by keeping jitter low. While both players use the same DAC, the CDP offers 24-bit 192 KHz upsampling. The CDP also has a volume control and digital inputs which make it possible to connect it directly to a power amplifier and skip the use of a preamplifier entirely. Multiple power supplies for different parts of the players keep high-current, noisy signals that drive the mechanism away from the delicate supplies used for the analogue sections of the digital to analogue conversion. However, just adding high quality parts is not enough to ensure a great musical sound. It is how these parts are applied that makes the most difference. Careful layout and care with the signals and grounding are as important as the components used.

All of the amplification components have had their distortion and bandwidth improved through careful component choice and close matching of values. The preamplifier's phono stage is now far more accurate and uses very tight tolerance parts to maintain high consistency between channels. The overall signal path has been shortened, and selected, high-quality components are used in key places. The Power amplifiers have had a similar tuning process. Special attention to layout, grounding, and performance consistency mean that they can be relied upon to amplify and pass the signal without modification. The overall effect is that music is just better with the Quad Elite products.