do planar or electrostatic speakers inherently

I cannot generalize to all speakers of these types but from my direct experience living for some time with examples of both types of speakers I can say absolutely YES to this question for the speakers I have owned.

I currently own both Merlin VSM/SE w/BAM and the full range Sound Lab Auras. The Merlin speakers deserve all the praise they receive and are truly wonderful speakers. As a caveat, I live in an apartment and admittedly my room is far from ideal. I also admit to probably never providing ideal (sufficient) power to the Sound Labs. However, I do a lot of listening at night and, therefore, at reduced volume, sometimes at very low volumes.

I am more than astonished at the Sound Lab’s ability to maintain tonal balance at incredibly low volume levels. To my ears, many, perhaps most, speakers seem to loose bass richness as the volume decreases. The Sound Labs do not. They remain completely balanced to almost inaudibility! This characteristic is growing on me. I like it a lot and it is part of the reason I am migrating from the Merlin to the Sound Lab for more and more of my listening.

If you, as I, have experienced a normal shift to “thinness” with decreasing volume for most speakers, then hearing the Sound Labs would be a revelation in this regard. You have to hear it to believe it and then to appreciate it in contrast to most other speakers.

Both of these speakers posess many other positive characteristics, I tried here to address the one in question.

Itigap,

Yessss! When I give a SoundLab demo, I like to show off just how good they sound way down at very low volume levels. I think the bass holds so much better than with other speakers at low volume level well because a woofer's suspension system is to a certain extent "sticky", and the stickiness is overwhelmed at normal listening levels but looms dominant at very low output levels. The ultrathin diaphragm of the SoundLabs (still to the best of my knowledge the thinnest in the industry) has no such "stickiness".

When I bought my first pair of SoundLabs, I had to sell just about everything else to afford them. I drove them with a three hundred fifty dollar solid state amp, and while the volume level was limited it was still the best sound I had yet heard in any audio system. I could listen way down at barely audible levels and still enjoy it immensely, and so far I haven't encountered any other speaker with that characteristic. Of course when I eventually got bigger amps they sounded better, but nothing was as huge of a leap as bringing in the SoundLabs that first time.

In case anyone doesn't know I'm a SoundLab dealer folks, so grains of salt all around.

Duke

From my experience, the answer is yes, when you are talking about typical dynamic speakers, but, horn systems and other high efficiency systems also sound very good at lower volumes.

Another low volume phenomenon that is a big advantage of dipoles is that sound is concentrated in the listening area between the speakers and is much more attenuated to the sides. This is because the front and back wave are out of phase and they cancel where they interact at the side of the speaker. So, at any given subjective volume level in the listening area, there is less annoying bleeding of sound to other areas of the house. I was surprised how substantial is this effect, when I switched from Martin Logan electrostatics to a horn-based system.

My Apogees sound pretty much the same anywhere in the room...they do not get louder when you walk up to them to any large degree.

Dave