electrostats vs ribbon drivers

Personally I can't say that your impressions are universally true based on my experiences Mr. Tennis. When I think of "hot" in planer/ribbon/electrostatic designs the first one that comes to mind is the original Martin Logan CLS from the mid 80's. Unfortunately I feel much of what I perceived as it being "hot" was the fact that there was so little low frequency information and it just didn't have a balanced presentation. I really didn't like it or the Sequel for that matter and because of those early experiences never though much of Martin Logan although I heard a few budget models years later where this impression wasn't the same.

So far as ribbons, I have listened to numerous Apogee models over the years and NEVER perceived the top to be hot. I would think if they did sound that way it could be a synergy issue with the amp maybe? A pair of Agogee Stages (2K retail at the time) still conjures up some of the best high frequency performance I've ever heard from any speaker at any price point. There was also a Clements speaker, can't remember the model number, that used a ribbon tweeter and it was not at all hot, actually I thought it was quite impressive how the tweeter blended with the dynamic drivers in that design.

Set up properly, Maggies are not necessarily 'hot'.
They actually have a slight rise in the bass end to compensate for the cancelation that occurs from front / back interaction. Listen to the exact edge of the panel and you will hear......nothing. The front / back wave cancel one another.

That being said, one of the big debates of panel users is the resistor which on many models can be inserted in the tweeter circuit. The 1.6s, for example, came with 1 ohm resistors.

I, too, found my 1.6s to be hot when I first set them up. Beamy, too. It was impossible to get a wide stage and not too hot. Opening up the toe would help, but the sweetspot was TINY.

Finally, during lots of reading and listening to others, I was made aware of the fact that OLD panels had the POLE PIECE forward...to the listener. New designs feature the MYLAR side to the listener. To me, flipping the panels to listen to them 'old school' made all the difference. Wider sweet spot and much less hot. No resistor needed.

Also, since the crossover on many Magnepan models is Asymmetric....I have a 12db slope on the low pass and 6db slope on the high pass, the low and high drivers are out of phase. Since the drivers are beside one another, one is slightly leading, the other lagging by the amont of phase difference caused by the crossover. Tweeter IN or OUT makes the difference. That's all I can think of to account for the greater clarity with tweeter 'in'.

EXPERIMENT away freely. This will apply to ALL magnepan models except the 20.1, which is a push / pull driver and has a pole piece on each side.

When in doubt? Ignore the directions. And get rid of that fuse, while you're at it. Too much extra wire and many more connections just muck things up. BE CAREFUL!

"the senses are unreliable. witnesses to an event often present different versions of an event."

"what you hear one day, you may not hear on another."

"there is a myriad of experiemnets in the psycholgy journals, which discuss the unreliability of perception."

"when you trust your senses, the result is probably true and probably false."

"relying on sense perception is invalid because the senses are unreliable."

All the above are copied and pasted from your recent posts on amps sounding the same(any spelling/grammatical errors are yours). You DID state that your view of ribbons, is no more than your opinion though. I've personally owned systems with ribbon tweeters(my 10" 3 Way was the most popular, in the line I built and sold), Acoustat Mod III's, and several Maggie models(what I'm using now). Though I've experienced grain and/or sibilance on occasion; it has always been the driver's reproduction of the sound elsewhere in the system, or of the recording. Not having heard every ribbon, magneto-planar or electrostatic system out there, I cannot comment further.

I owned Innersound electrostats hybrids but gave them up for ribbon hybrids from VMPS because VMPS offered a all around more rounded and thus more usable and enjoyable speaker. Head in a vise speakers get boring after awhile, atleast for me they did.

how many who have auditioned both electrostatic-based and ribbon based designs prefer one or the other ?

by the way, regarding my comment on the treble response of ribbon drivers, especially ribbon tweeters, what i consider bright or peaky, others may not. so it becomes a matter of perception.

i suppose i may be more sensitive to frequencies exceeding 3000 hz than many on these forums, which may be at odds with others.