Your favorite Electrostatic, Panel spkr

bdp24- you are absolutely correct. The rest of the speaker is planar magnetic. You can not make true ribbons very wide. Magnetic energy drops off at the square of the distance so you can not spread the magnetism much of a distance. The Diva Mid range which was a true ribbon was a little over an inch wide and that was pushing it.The woofer was planar magnetic. It is also the reason the Maggie tweeter is a bit fragile. The ribbon runs in a "U" shaped extrusion with slots cut in it. Magnets are glued to the sides of the "U" The ribbon is tacked down every other magnet alternating sides with a little glob of blue something or other. The ribbon is aluminum foil laminated to a very thin layer of plastic. Most of you have played with aluminum foil. It bends easily and if you go too far it will crease. If you keep bending it back and forth it will work harden and break. It will break if it gets overheated which you may have seen if you barbeque 

barbecue with it. It is very fragile compared to other materials but nothing else works as well as aluminum. I tried making a titanium ribbon speaker with titanium foil and neodymium magnets. It worked great until the ribbon started to get warm (higher resistance than aluminum) then it expanded and started flapping and waving all over the place. So much for that experiment. Anyway, the Magnepan tweeter is much more durable that the Diva tweeter was but Magnepan tweeters are blown all the time. Fortunately, Magnepan supports their speakers well.  

@richopp
The ML HQD was an interesting look and I assumed that you wasn't suggesting for OPs room, but as a point of interest. I should have put a LOL after my comment.

I Always enjoy your posts.......Jim

A true ribbon CAN be made in a wide width (Apogee did it), but it's expensive. Such a ribbon is very insensitive, and apparently it's impedance has to be very low (Apogee's sure was). A difficult loudspeaker to pull off, but some consider the Apogees the best they've ever heard. I've never heard one, the best I've heard are imo ESL's, though magnetic-planars have their charms.

bdp24, even with neodymium magnets the field strength drops of very quickly. You can increase the magnets deeper front to back but the you start to make the ribbon beam and cause diffraction effects plus the magnets, even the Chinese ones get prohibitively expensive. This may be why the Divas were everybody's favorites and when the humidity was right (joking) they were wonderful and I did live with them for almost a decade but they were fragile, volume limited and lacking in deep bass whereas the 2+2s I have now are indestructible, go loud as h-ll but are still deep bass challenged. After year/decades of piddling around I finally figured out a way to put subwoofers under them but I would never have been able to do it without digital bass management and it would have taken a lot longer without the system I have which allows me to change both high and low pass filters independently on the fly from my seat with a laptop. I have not changed the configuration now for somewhere around five years which for me is a very long Time. The Soundlabs, because they are so wide will produce very deep bass and I believe most people use them without subwoofers but because they are one-way speakers the entire frequency range is doppler effected by the long excursions deep bass takes. My long experience with ESLs of various configurations tells me that removing the low bass from them will increase clarity, banish any volume compression and add perhaps 10dB of headroom. But it will take a lot of subwoofers to make it work. The 845 is a very big loudspeaker. The plan right now is to use eight 12" Morel drivers in four sealed decagonal enclosures made of 2" thick MDF. Nice Winter project (after I finish the kitchen or somebody we know is going to be in big trouble.)