Speed kills....


Which is why I love 'stats so much.  For myself, dynamics and leading edge transients are essential.  Are there any alternatives in terms of dynamic "boxey" type (verity?) speakers that I should listen to?  My present speakers are hales t8's (hales has been out of business a long time ago) and they are about as far away from that ideal as you can get.   I want to go in a different direction for my FINAL set of speakers.

russellrcncom
ATC actives are well known for dynamics and lack of compression on transients. Dynamics are quite often the missing element from many systems which are otherwise excellent in other respects.
Music Reference is offering a direct-drive ESL for $12k. That buys you left and right panels, each of which is powered by it's own direct-drive tube amp (no output transformer on the amp, no input transformer on the panels!), plus a pair of 8" dynamic woofers for 100Hz down. No power amp(s) needed, nor speaker cables.
A lot of the aparent speed and detail of electrostats is in the lack of dispersion, but the truth is they can store quite a lot of energy which in any other speaker we’d blame for muddy sounding results. Take a look at figure 6 here:

https://www.stereophile.com/content/martinlogan-masterpiece-renaissance-esl-15a-loudspeaker-measurem...

What electrostatics do spectacularly very well is ignore a lot of the room acoustics. It's really hard to achieve the same level of clarity at the listening room with point source type speakers.

And please don’t come after me, I like ESL speakers. I just want to broaden the understanding of what it is we like about them.