QUAD Revela 1 Loudspeakers

The Revela 1 is Quad’s modern stand-mount, and it carries more company history than its size suggests. Quad’s very first loudspeaker, the Corner Ribbon of 1949, used a ribbon driver. Seven years later, in 1956, Peter Walker’s team in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire introduced the QUAD ESL — the world’s first full-range electrostatic loudspeaker, a design that would remain in production, virtually unchanged, for twenty-eight years. The Revela 1 is what happens when the company that wrote both of those chapters returns to its founding driver topology and engineers a contemporary two-way around it.

The tweeter is a True Ribbon — a 27 × 60 mm element developed over four years by Peter Comeau, Quad’s Director of Acoustics. It is paired with a 165 mm Reveal cone driver of new advanced-fibre composition, chosen for its rigidity and self-damping behaviour, and crossed over at 2.9 kHz via a phase-compensated Acoustic Butterworth network. The result is a tweeter that resolves without edge, a mid-bass that integrates without seam, and a presentation that the British press has spent the last eighteen months arguing is closer to a £5,000 speaker than a £1,800 one.

The cabinet is the part most often undersold in writing. It is a sandwich of high-density and medium-density fibreboard, internally braced and damped with a mixture of acoustic foam and synthetic fibre selected to behave like matted long-hair wool. The exterior is hand-finished in your choice of Piano Walnut or Piano Black — real-wood veneer or seamless polished paint, both polished to a grand-piano gloss. At 24.6 kg per speaker it has the inertial mass to disappear acoustically in a way that lighter cabinets at this size cannot.

The Revela 1 is a stand-mount; partnering it with Quad’s purpose-built QQ-S1 Stand is the way the speaker was voiced to be heard. Sensitivity is 86 dB and the recommended amplifier window is 30–120 W — meaning the Revela 1 is genuinely amplifier-agnostic, comfortable with the kind of integrated valve or solid-state amplifier our customers tend to own, and not asking for heroics.

This is the right speaker for a second system that doesn’t apologise — a study, a smaller listening room, a den that wants real music rather than background. It is also the right first proper speaker for the listener returning to high-end audio after a long absence; the kind of speaker that proves, in the first five minutes, that the records on the shelf have always been better than the system that played them. Designed and hand-finished in the United Kingdom, with Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire as Quad’s home since 1941.

Key Features

• 27 × 60 mm True Ribbon high-frequency driver — four years of development by Peter Comeau, Quad’s Director of Acoustics
• 165 mm Reveal cone mid-bass driver of new advanced-fibre composition, custom rubber surround
• Phase-compensated Acoustic Butterworth crossover at 2.9 kHz
• HDF/MDF sandwich cabinet, internally braced, damped with acoustic foam and synthetic fibre
• Hand-finished Piano Walnut (real-wood veneer) or Piano Black (seamless polished paint), grand-piano gloss
• Precision-engineered bass-reflex port, optimised diameter and flare to suppress longitudinal resonance
• Sensitivity 86 dB / 2.83 V @ 1 m; 30–120 W recommended amplifier power
• Designed and hand-finished in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire — Quad’s home since 1941

Awards & Press

• Hi-Fi News, Outstanding Product 2024: “The Revela 1 doesn’t just excel at £1,799; the sound and build suggest £5,000.” [VERIFY award wording at hifinews.com/content/quad-revela-1-loudspeaker before publishing]
• Hi-Fi Choice: “Sounds bigger and more open … a wealth of detail that really unlocks the recording.”

Specifications

Quad Revela 1 on quad-hifi.co.uk →