Is it possible to really know what you're doing?

@devinplombier 

I say this as someone who’s always loved the transparency and speed of planar speakers. I was this close to buying a set of Sanders 10e, but merely standing up from your chair felt as if someone had put a motorcycle helmet over your ears. They are amazing-sounding speakers that I warmly recommend to anyone who doesn’t mind their beaminess, but at the end of the day I’m glad I didn’t buy them

For forty years or so I have listened to Quad electrostatic ’planar’ loudspeakers, the ESL-63 and ESL 2905 to be precise, backed by subwoofers from Duntech and then Velodyne.

In my opinion, these electrostatics are amongst the most misunderstood designs of all time (ha, back on topic!).

Peter Walker, the designer, certainly knew about the ’beaminess’ issue displayed by almost all planar designs.  He also knew from his original electrostatics, now known as the 57, about cross-over issues with multiple drivers.

The overarching brilliance of his design was to make a planar panel behave like a virtual point source of sound.  The point source is about a foot (30 cms) behind the diaphragm.  You can envisage the sound waves radiating in spherical wavefronts from the point source.  When these imaginary waves reach the panel, the first bit to move is the centre.  Then the wavefront expands outwards in a circle.

Peter emulated this behaviour by arranging eight annular rings to be fed the signal with increasing delay towards the outside.  Note that the delay need only factor in the speed of sound from the virtual point source.

When you add in the lack of cabinet colouration (there isn’t one) and the speed of a diaphragm almost as light as air, y0u can see why the Gramophone equipped its main reviewers with ESL-63 speakers.  I found I could walk round my FREDs (Full Range Electrostatic Dipoles) and the sound was consistent even in the plane of the panel, where there should be no output at all!  I put that down to coherent wall reflections and the ear-brain’s ability.

Alas, nothing is perfect and the protection circuits in the ESLs are more easily triggered by the peaks in digital source material - like Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story.

These days I mainly use another speaker designed to emulate a point source, the KEF Reference 1.  Like you, I bought a pair secondhand as stop gaps while repairing my Quads.  The KEFs play so much louder!

@richardbrand  I agree that Time Machine's performance is amazing. I'm not sure how Rex interpreted Grainger’s use of the foot pedals — By ear I would guess.

Thank you for reminding me about L2. I was astonished to learn how productive they've been in recent years since I last visited their website. That got me thinking again about multichannel streamers and DACs, which are still quite rare. I suppose both we and the market have been largely two-channel driven.

Now I realize that when playing these multichannel formats on a 2-channel system, the original spatial (surround) placement gets lost in translation. My 2-channel setup — and perhaps no 2-channel system — can truly reproduce that 3D effect, especially the instruments or vocals that are originally placed behind the listener. Even my soundstage isn’t wide enough to fully cover side vocals. Clearly, a multichannel system is needed to reproduce that experience accurately.  That’s why I’ve never used "3D holographic" as one of my system metrics — only "depth" or "layering" — due to the inherent limitations of two-channel playback.

Are you motivated to invest a multichannel stereo or you have it already? 

@lanx0003 

Are you motivated to invest a multichannel stereo or you have it already? 

I've combined my video and audio playback capabilities for almost as long as I can remember, although it took me a long time to add rear speakers and even longer to cut holes in the ceiling for height speakers.

My main source is now a Reavon universal disk player, which inherits much of the technology from the high-end Oppo players but with much inferior Burr-Brown DACs.  So I just use it as a transport feeding out HDMI audio and separately HDMI video.  It natively handles SACD and many Blu-Ray audio formats including Dolby Atmos.

I use a Marantz AV8802 pre-processor feeding a 2-channel Krell KSA80 Class A amplifier for the main speakers, and a six-channel Perreaux amplifier for the rest.  No centre channel by design!

The Marantz has an array of eight identical Asahi Kasei Microdevices (AMD) 2-channel DACs, which each handle Direct Stream Digital natively, as well as PCM up to 192-kHz at 24-bits.  They are far superior to the Reavon's Burr-Brown DACs.

So quite a different setup compared to the 2-channel streaming 'norm' many here use.

I'm not sure how Rex interpreted Grainger’s use of the foot pedals — By ear I would guess

I will re-read the technical details on how Percy Grainger's piano rolls were recorded, and report back shortly.  Percy did a lot of editing work fixing errors - the result was how "he would have liked to have played"!

Musicianship....Composition......everything else (tone, imaging as examples) are icing on the cake. Determine what characteristics are important to you and strive for those. This can take some time for many.