Heard of Soltanus Acoustics ESL Virtuoso ?

Just trying to get the name out and let people know about a great sounding electrostat.
I used to own and sell Quad's but since the IAG move to China getting them is very difficult.
The Virtuoso's will be on display at the 2015 Montreal HiFi show.

He is the distributor so it this surprising.

Greetings, I review for Dagogo.com, and am fairly familiar with ESL products in North America. I have a technical question about the descriptions of the speaker gleaned from your post and the Six Moons article:

How can this be a crossover-less design and incorporate a tweeter bias function? Why would there be discussion of a tweeter adjustment if there is no crossover? How would one separate out the function of the tweeter for adjustment if there is no crossover?

The article includes this sentence, "The high-frequency panel measures 120x14cm and is designed to cover 200-20'000Hz," which seems to definitively show that it is not a crossover-less speaker.

Even if not crossover-less, it does have a couple features not normally found on ESL speakers. The impedance matching seems to be a significant feature.

Ok, I did some more investigating on the Soltanus site. It seems they're simply running both panel sets flat out and letting them merge without a crossover. Correct?

Or, perhaps more accurately, they are running both the driver sets with independent attenuation. Would that be an accurate description of the technology employed? The flexibility would be marvelous, but I would think it also could mean if the driver sets were adjusted poorly, the performance would suffer accordingly.

I do, however, like the fact that each owner could blend the driver sets' performance to one's pleasure. The Legacy Audio Whisper DSW (reviewed for Dagogo.com) has a high degree of flexibility in contouring the driver groups between Bass, Midrange and Treble. If the owner is careless, the sound can be harmed, but, OTOH if the owner is deft, the performance can be tuned to the extreme. I would expect that Soltanus is expecting owners to cook up their own combination to suit their taste, and if it's not all that perfect performance-wise, it will still be the "best" for that owner.

It's not a bad idea, for there usually is little adaptation for ESL speakers.

How can this be a crossover-less design and incorporate a tweeter bias function?

The panels are acoustically balanced to match each other, plus the audio transformer with it's RLC characteristic is making separation in frequency range in interaction with the capacitive load . Of course this separation between panels is not 24 or 18dB in octave. This separation is like first order crossover.The transformer has separate outputs for bass panels (higher voltage), and the tweeter panel has it's own output from the transformer.



Why would there be discussion of a tweeter adjustment if there is no crossover? How would one separate out the function of the tweeter for adjustment if there is no crossover?

The tweeter can be adjusted by its own supply voltage-(it has no effect on it's frquency characteristic) the sensitivity of the tweeter is adjustable without crossover of course. By this way you can have sound with more or less bass, because the sensitivity of bass panels stays the same.



The article includes this sentence, "The high-frequency panel measures 120x14cm and is designed to cover 200-20'000Hz," which seems to definitively show that it is not a crossover-less speaker.

As I mentioned it is a crossoverless design. The tweeter panel is acoustically designed to work from 200Hz to 20KHz.



Even if not crossover-less, it does have a couple features not normally found on ESL speakers. The impedance matching seems to be a significant feature.

The impedance of Virtuoso is like a GAUSS curve (0 Ohm in 0Hz). It is an electrical proof of the crossoverless design. If you have some crossover in the circuit, even one capacitor, then the impedance will increase by going down in frequency (in bass region) See some full range ESL like Soundlab, QUAD or others. It is not the case with Virtuoso.