ESS speakers "Translinear" Transstatic

I just registered for this site as I was trying to remember the name of the speakers I owned that had an oval KEF woofer and electrostatic elements. I believe I was using a Phase Linear 400 to drive them and blew a lot of the RTR elements. I seem to recall the woofers did a strange thing when overdriven. You must remember the era that these speakers were available. My memory is decidedly fuzzy and it's not all due to advanced age. My roommate at the time had a JBL Paragon that sat between the Transstatics. When he got tired of the Paragon, we both purchased a pair of Infinity Servo Statik I speakers and stacked the panels in our living room. Talk about blown RTRs. I now own Thiel CS3.5s but this forum brought back a lot of memories.

Sort of new here but I too have a pair of ESS.
Bought new in '79, AMT-1-Towers. Not the Translinear but rather the evolved legendary BIG Heils. Fabulous ESS sound from a 48"? Quarter Wave Transmission line Tower.
Recently re-foamed and new X-over parts. Better than ever.
Thanks for the small hijack.

Was ESS the same company as Sound Stream?

Wasn't Dr. Oscar Heil the inventor of the Heil talk box, used by guitar players like Joe Walsh and Peter Frampton?

I was a tech in R&D for ESS for 1.5 yrs. '77-'78. The company was long past the electrostatics by then. I hired on there so I could afford a pair($450 ea.) of what I believed were the best sounding speakers in the world. Don't have all the answers for your questions, forget the 'statics they were before my time and did not compare with the Heil AMT.
I helped with the proto-types of all of the systems at the time including one special one called the Transar (full range Heil AMT). I left the company with what may well have been the best pair of speakers to that date: 1978 AMT1B Bookshelf built in the lab by myself with hand tested

The Transstatics were low sensitivity loudspeakers so they would not play loudly without the potential for damage. My store sold a few and fortunately they were discontinued before we sold many. It was a very good sounding system but just not meant to be played loudly. The Phase Linear 400 was not a good match. The Phase Linear 700B might have been better but still was a poor match for the Transstatics. We serviced just about every Phase 400 we ever sold. You guys must have been loaded to be able to afford the JBL Paragon. I use to stare at that system in the Dell audio directory published yearly and daydream about owning it. Other speakers that caught my eye during that period were the Stephens with enclosures designed by Eames. They were virtually identical to JBL. In fact, Stephens originally worked at JBL in the early days. However, the sound of JBL, Altec, and Stephens was becoming obsolete in many ways with introduction of the acoustic suspension systems and the "New England Sound."