Effects Of Power Cords On Electrostatic Speakers

Galen Gareis presented the following talk at the Masterclass Sessions at the AXPONA show, titled "The Uncommonly Understood Nature of Common Cable Characteristics."

Technical Papers: Iconoclast Cable

Video posted on this page.

As an engineer for 4+ decades, I found this fascinating. Especially since most of my EE peers did not have the knowledge of cable design. This should be a must see in entirety for all the cable naysayers.

Anyways, he does make a few comments toward the end about why E-stats can run better with a different cable than most box speakers being fed by standard amplifier.

Hope this helps.

@bugredmachine Good point! ESL's need low capacitance / high inductance cable, whereas magnetic speakers need the opposite. Otherwise is gone the HF !

Easy to get low capacitance / high inductance cables: just run two separate wires an inch apart. Save the bucks for better transducers.

@hsbrock

Yes, seamless integration across the audio spectrum. The character of the ribbons or ATM is completely different from a dynamic woofer. One of the reasons big Maggie’s are attractive (with massive power amps). You get the same character of sound across the audio spectrum. I never could hear the difference in character of the drivers on my ESS AMT 1D’s, until I could. Then I happily moved on.. and up… typically most of us increase our investment over time… and each level up has less overall weaknesses and more strengths (provided you choose wisely).

So many aspects of audio are unimportant until you hear them… then you just cannot un-hear them.

Roger Sanders makes two different speaker cables: one specifically for ESL's, the other for planar-magnetics.

Hi, John. Good to see you here!

After we spoke and I got to running the numbers on electrostatic speakers. Most ’Stats run voltages in the 350V - 450V at 12ma - 25ma. Current requirements are steady state and the speaker power supply does little in the context of dynamics. The only "real" advantages to using aftermarket power cables is in the context of noise reduction.

I do have an idea on this. We’ll talk...