What kind of power wakes up electrostatic speakers

By the way, Innersound told me that their ESL amp is indeed a "switching" amp. That's why it runs so cool. How does this relate to switching amp's generally poor capability to deal with wide impedence ranges? Clearly the ESL handles this kind of variability fairly well.

That's a new one on me. My two ESL amps run very, very hot when I'm cranking the 3.6s, impedances are low but flat. Another friend drives his EROS MKII panels with an ESL and plays the music very loud. The amp runs cool. Another friend runs Clements RT-7s (ribbon tweeter, cone woofer) with his ESL and the amp can get warm, but not hot, with loud volumes.

Well... I think I got it right from Innersound... If anyone can clear this up, please do. Thanks.

The Innersound amp is not a switching amplifier. It is a classical class AB complementary symmetry transistor design. The original amplifier had the bias on the output stage turned up to run in class A. Later a revision was made that put the amplifier into class AB operation (lowered the bias currents) and some negative feedback was also added to keep things under control. With this revision the amplifier now runs cool at low power. Of course, as power increases losses due also so the unit will heat up.

The Innersound is an excellent design. A very well executed class AB amplifier. Arguably this amp tosses the guantlet for the law of diminishing returns.

The ESL amps are actually Coda's low-end "Continuum" line. These should not be confused with Coda's branded line, which is quite superior in sound and quality to the Continuum. I've driven M-L CLS IIz with both a Continuum and the higher-end Coda 20.5. The Continuum worked well, but the Coda 20.5 was magical in comparision.

There are plenty of good amps out there for driving ESLs and panels. Lots of good advice here, but nothing beats listening in you own environment.