Soundlab speakers

I used them for years, imagine a Quad with bass and huge soundstage and ability to play loud.

It's a great speaker and I understand they worked out the problems I had with mine a decade ago. If that's true it deserves to be on the top speaker list along with the other high end offerings.

I've never owned a pair of Soundlab's, but I've heard them several times and liked them very much. Definitely worth looking in to. Also, they were always paired with Boulder. It must be a very good match.

Big Perreaux and tubed Wolcott's, both of which I owned worked well. The speakers were, I believe A3 or M3 (I'm a gear hound and get confused by the alphabet soup we audio folks live in) and had the PX upgrades.

They were as Albert described. I used mine with the old isobaric loaded Talon subs and they were awesome. In spite of the Wolcott raves you may find, I preferred mine with the quite pricy and hard to find Perreaux monos.

HOWEVER, make sure your environment is well controlled humidity wise. The same as a Ferrari, etc., I guess...high performance does make some demands. When the bias is set right, it can change as the speaker warms up and if/as your humidity varies during the day/week/season. Sometimes, I would walk into my listening room and the stink of ozone and snapping would remind me that I forgot to dial back the bias last session.

I live at the beach, so the constant tweaking and dialing in the sweet spot frustrated me to the point where I got rid of mine.

I should have spent the money to upgrade my room and HVAC: yeah, they were that good.

I don't know where the OP has been, but they are spoken of on a regular basis.

Sound Lab showed the speaker with a new back panel at the 2013 CES (THE Show actually) that made the speaker a *lot* easier to drive, and also sounding better (likely because it does not work the amps as hard).

Our 140-watt MA-1 drives it really well! In the past, you needed a set of MA-2s to do the same job. (FWIW, about 70% of our MA-2 production since the amp was introduced in 1990 has been on Sound Labs)

Since the introduction of the PX panel I have also heard good things about reliability from our customers. I think it very safe to say the Sound Lab is a state of the art speaker, certainly the best ESL out there, capable of real dynamic range and good well into the bottom octave- you can shake the walls with this one!