Speed kills....

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. 

The Music Reference ESLs achieve much better dispersion without sacrificing speed. While some designed curved panels to improve dispersion, there were other sonic trade offs involved. It's why Roger Sanders stuck with a flat panel.

Roger Modjeski learned a thing or two from Harold Beveridge. I took the panels out of my Acoustat Model 2's and had Roger modify them to mimic his panels dispersion. The difference is not subtle. One doesn't have to sit in the sweet spot with their head in a vice to enjoy the sonic pleasures of what an ESL should provide. Not to mention the mid-range in Roger's design is the closest I have ever heard to an ESL-57.

One of the major disadvantages of an ESL is the transformer. I never used the Acoustat interfaces as I run mine with direct drive amps and before that ran them with the same electronics and transformer Roger designed for his ESLs, powering the speakers with a Music Reference RM-200. Based on my experience I can easily say direct drive is the way to go.

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.  

Wait...are you saying you think the Hales T8's are "slow" with transients or something?   

I sure wouldn't say so, having heard them a few times, and having owned the slightly smaller T5s (and I still own Hales T1 speakers).   I'd take the T8's over any planar speaker I've heard.  But, hey, we all get the "want something different" itch. 

Prof: the t8's are slow when I compare them to my stax headphones. Very coherent but slow.  I guess I'm trying to replicate the stax sound but on a larger scale.   that probably  puts me in the planar camp, but space is an issue, otherwise the new maggies would certainly be something I would entertain.  The hales are17 years old and I would like to think speaker design has evolved to the point where there are now options that didn't exist previously. Would  Martin Logan's get me there?  They have a slightly larger footprint than the hales and suffer in the wife agreement dept. Is there anything else out there?