I am a man of few hobbies. Generally speaking, I don’t like to take on too many different interests, because I don’t feel able to invest into all of them the amount of energy I see as necessary to truly appreciate them for what they are. I like to be able to focus. That said, the hobbies I have chosen to bring into my life up to this point are photography (which also serves as a second job), reading, and music. In this post I will be focusing on the last.
When I say that music is a hobby for me, I don’t mean playing it, but listening to it. I certainly wouldn’t call myself a musician, but I will spend hours of my day simply sitting in my living room listening to music through my stereo system. And, being rather a nerdy person, that stereo system is itself something I put a lot of energy into. Honestly, the gear used to listen to music has become nearly a separate hobby in itself. Certainly, I appreciate the music that I get to hear through my speakers — but finding those speakers, and testing them against other speakers, and connecting them to various amplifiers to find which ones sound the best to me — that is absolutely a part of this hobby for me. The hi-fi hobby, some might say. That is, an endless pursuit of better sound, more beautiful equipment, and a more pleasing setup overall.
This setup has gone through various stages for me in the last few years, certainly. My first stereo setup was a pair of JBL Studio 180 tower speakers, connected to a Harman Kardon HK 3770, which is no longer made. I ended up getting rid of that receiver at some point before moving to Arkansas, and switching to running my speakers through what I believe was an old Technics receiver. What a beginning that was. After settling in Fayetteville I continued working with vintage amplifiers, in part because I couldn’t afford something more modern. I did keep the JBLs until the end of 2019, when I passed them along to friends and headed off to Australia. On returning to Arkansas I moved in with my friend John, who I soon learned was a fan of the Canadian hi-fi brand Paradigm. I had not heard of this company before, but soon became a fan myself, as the speakers that they make are, modestly put, very good. (It would be more accurate to call them wildly impressive. To me at any rate.) After listening to John’s Mini Monitors for a while, each of us became inspired to dive back into stereo listening, and get some more equipment to do this. And, having discovered a booth at a flea market that stocks nothing but audio gear, we began cycling through pieces. I bought a pair of Paradigm Monitor towers, which I returned because one of the tweeters was damaged. Which then meant picking up a different piece from this booth, the beautiful Yamaha CA-610 II Natural Sound Stereo Receiver — which I have become a big fan of. It’s made me think even higher of Yamaha as an audio brand, and it is really hard to beat the looks of vintage ‘70s stereo gear, with the brushed aluminum fronts, the solid switches and knobs, and in this case the lovely output level meters, which light up with a beautiful warm yellow light as they move to the music. This has been my main amp since purchasing it more than a year ago, and so far all of the speakers I’ve paired with it have sounded great. The first pair were JBL 82T bookshelf speakers; rather large for the size of their drivers, and more bright than balanced, I really enjoyed these, but I have since passed them on to some friends to start off their stereo music journey. The speakers I replaced them with are the KEF Q15. As with Paradigm, I’d been essentially ignorant of this brand, but KEF is quite well-known in the hi-fi world, and the Q15 is a very capable little bookshelf speaker, and more balanced and clear than the JBLs by a good step. Even so, after listening to another pair of old Paradigms that my roommate recently picked up, I again found myself wanting a more full, large sound from my system, and the KEFs, while very good, just weren’t cutting it. So, a few weeks ago, I bit the bullet and made a purchase I’d been trying to avoid for a long while.
In this flea market that John and I like to frequent, there has been a pair of tower speakers that I’d taken notice of one of the first times I visited this booth. Their design intrigued me, and I couldn’t help wonder about them, especially given the lack of information I was able to find on them after searching the web for a bit. So, I brought my Yamaha into the shop, pulled the towers down and gave them a spin. And they were good. Certainly good enough to justify the price they were listed for. So I brought them home, and hooked them up in the living room. And what a difference that has made. Being able to listen to them in a proper environment, rather than merely testing them in a cramped little flea market, I can say with certainty that these are among the best speakers I’ve ever heard.
These are the MB Quart QL C 604 floorstanding loudspeakers. And it took some work to find out much at all about them. They are labeled on the back by the connectors, and the sticker there tells me they’re made in Germany. But MB Quart today is not a German brand, and doesn’t produce home audio equipment. After searching around a bit I discovered a part of MB Quart’s story, and learned that in 2005 the German company had been bought out by an American brand, who continued to use the MB Quart name, despite production moving to China and focus shifting to car audio products. I emailed MB Quart asking if they had any information on the speakers I’d purchased, and they replied informing me that the company they’d bought out had closed their doors, and thus no information could be found for me. However, after some more searching I found what I believed to be the new company formed by the German team from MBQ after the buyout, and reached out to them. They got back to me and sent me two documents. One appears to be some sort of schematic, and the other a little brochure or product page showing MBQ’s line of home audio gear, among them the QL C 604. All of the documentation is in German, but using Google to translate it does give me a little bit of info. Honestly the main things I wanted to know were what happened to the company, and when my speakers had been produced. From the schematic it appears they are from 2000, which is about what I’d expected. I also can’t find any solid information on what they would have cost, but it appears it would have been substantially more than the $300 I paid for them. Whatever they cost twenty years ago, today they are extremely rare, and I am very happy to have found them, and snagged them before someone else realized what they were.
And that’s my story for today. If you’re an audio nerd like me, you maybe appreciated it. If not, you may just have to come by and listen to the speakers yourself.
love,
— Joel
Geeky Things
Camera: Fuji X-Pro2
Lens: Fuji 35mm f/2
Location: My apartment
Notes: These photos are the result of one of the random impulses I get from time to time to photograph my home. Often it’s brought on by my noticing how the light is coming in through the blinds, as it was on this occasion. I loved how the sun laid such pretty lines across the front of the speakers, and since I hadn’t photographed them at all yet it served as the perfect opportunity. The towers are pretty modern styled black boxes, and in the first couple images you see the interesting driver design that first caught my eye, with the concave rubber centres. The tweeter is a pure titanium build, and all the drivers were made in Germany with the rest of the speaker cabinet. Honestly, any time you find a speaker that is designed and built all in the same country (and it’s not China) you’ve probably got a decent product on your hands. At the moment I have them set up in our living room on either side of the television, so we get to enjoy their sound with movies as well as music. I will likely always have a good stereo system as a centrepiece in my home.