?It's nice to read this article and it goes quite a way to explaining the situation of the Dahlquist DQ10.?
I have owned 7 pairs of DQ10's from the very 1st non-mirrored DQ10's to a pair from the penultimate year of manufacture.
Many of these I have had to re-cap and have replaced broken or dysfunctional drive units where required - other than that I have exchanged the Motorola piezo tweeter with 'matched pair Motorola piezo's' chosen both electrically and audibly.
Ok, what does all of this experience from 1975 to 2020 actually tell me?
The DQ10 with it's very unusual driver array and crossover, originally designed by Jon Dahlquist, and apart from the mirroring modification introduced by Carl Marchisotti (CM), is a 100% original Jon Dahlquist design which is substantially different acoustically from the DQ12, DQ20 and DQ20i - plus all of the other CM designs which followed.
I have owned all of the Dahlquist open baffle designs, still owning several pairs of DQ10, DQ12 and DQ20's and can say that the DQ10 is the most 'musical' of the entire range.?
The DQ12 and DQ20 are very, very good, I think more accurate than the DQ10 in the rendition of the musical signal especially compared to modern designs from Thiel, Focal, Wilson, etc however, when listening to the 10's compared to the 12's or 20's the 10's have a more natural and pervasive sound which is very difficult to actually better when played with excellent ancilliaries.
Interestingly, CM left Dahlquist due to 'bean counter' control and he left to form his own company.??
The original new speaker design he built, Alon IV, is in my view simply an 'better presented and updated DQ20i.
I have owned both of them and listened to them extensively 'side by side' and they are very definitely from the same stable, the Alon IV is without a doubt the better speaker, not by much though, CM did a very good job on the original DQ20 and 'i' for Dahlquist.
So, for those members who love their CM designed DQ20 and or DQ20i a 'perfected' version is available in the form of the Alon IV and it really is a perfected DQ20i.
However, for all those who love and appreciate the original Jon Dahlquist designed DQ10, there is no alternative to the original, they are very different in their musical presentation to any of the subsequent Dahlquist designs and IMHO the original DQ10 design with properly matched and balanced Motorola piezo tweeters is still in 2020 a truly competitive loudspeaker.?
On Monday, July 27, 2020, Thomas Abbott via <tabbott59=
[email protected]> wrote:
Carl Marchisotto, currently of NOLA speakers, speaks briefly about his time at Dahlquist in this article.?
drianhodgson