Your favorite Electrostatic, Panel spkr

Jim, your Rouge integrated amp will have no trouble driving 645s to a reasonable level probably louder than the Maggies. However the 3.7i is an incredible speaker for the money. It is purely a financial decision. Either speaker will benefit from  subwoofers down the road. 

Mike,

I don't want to hijack the thread.   Yup, the panels are curved like the ML’s.    The total speaker height is 75-3/4” and the panels are approx 13” wide by 65-1/4” tall.

thanks.

Martin Logans make my ears bleed, Maggies otoh sound quite natural.

Thanks for the info. Mike.
Purely from a financial standpoint, am considering the 3.7s over the 645s. Since I don’t listen at loud levels, it might be worth trying the Rogue with the 3.7s. I still have my trusty old high current (200/350W) ADCOM to fall back on for a while, if the Rogue isn’t quite enough.....Jim 

We've been in business 43 years. Over that time, we've had lots of customers with ESLs- OTLs and ESLs have been the match made in heaven (sound wise, anyway) since the ESL57 was first introduced.

I've heard a lot of ESLs with our amps at customer's homes and also at audio shows. IME/IMO Sound Lab is the state of the art in ESLs- they play the widest bandwidth and most dynamic range of any ESL made. A recent change in them (about 4-5 years ago) also made them fairly easy to drive.

FWIW, ESLs behave differently from box speakers in that the impedance curve is based on a capacitor rather than a driver in a box (with its resulting resonance). This should be fairly obvious, but the take home is that the speaker is thus best driven by an amplifier that can make constant power rather than constant voltage, due to the opening statement in this paragraph. Since most amplifiers are intended to be voltage sources (example: a solid state amp that can double its power as impedance is halved), they will tend to sound bright on an ESL and also lack bass impact. This is because the ESL impedance curve typically varies by about 9 or 10:1 from the bass frequencies to the highs.


When you get a Sound Lab set up properly, you will find it to be one of the fastest and most transparent speakers made.