Quote Originally Posted by Mr Peabody
My Stat experience has only been Maggie and Martin Logan. Even one of the large pairs of Maggies driven by Levinson didn't come close to the excellence of ML. What is your opinion of ML, E-stat? Maggies aren't my cup of tea but they would not be bad for acoustic and Classical for the money with the amp to drive them.
My first experience with Martin-Logan goes back to the late seventies when a friend of mine replaced his Dayton-Wrights (which got me interested w/stats in the first place) with a pair of CLSes. They were very open sounding with better top end than the D-Ws, but somewhat lacking in low bass. No beaming like the Acoustats I had at the time. Great speaker. Over the years, however, M-L has moved away from full range designs and now focus on hybrids using cone woofers for the bottom. For me, that defeats their most important attribute - unmatched top to bottom coherence. No matter how well you do it, matching dissimilar drivers is always a challenge. Especially when one tries to match an electrostat whose mass that is less than the air it moves with that of a dynamic woofer that is comparatively massive. There is a special way that full range stats reproduce something like a piano - or voice that continues to endear them to me, where most speakers must use multiple drivers with necessarily different radiation patterns to achieve the same goal. BTW, Maggies are not stats. While they are planar in design and radiate as dipolars, they are driven by a series of bar magnets spaced across the diaphragm. Like cone speakers where the force is centered on the voice coil (but to a lesser degree), they rely on the diaphragm stiffness to distribute the driving force. The electrostatic force, however, is driven uniformly across the entire diaphragm and results in a singular purity. Dr. West said at a Chicago Audio Society meeting that he has devoted his life to making music from sandwich wrap.

The other characteristic I favor with large planars, electrostat or otherwise, is they are line sources. Vertical dispersion of electrostats is virtually nil, but rendered unnecessary when the array is seven or more feet tall. The image does not change at all when one stands up. The size of the apparent sound field can be most realistic. I have yet to hear any speaker using a one inch tweeter effectively create the illusion of an entire sound stage. A whole bunch of them in a vertical array like the Pipedreams designs, yes - but not a single driver.

rw