spritzer

It does make perfect sense for them as their customers aren't after quality, they just want something flashy. M-L is going leaps and bounds backwards by decreasing the panel size and letting it flex freely. They are also firmly in the 80's with the diaphragm thickness. Basically made to look pretty but with little to no regard for sound quality. They even have a part of the panel overlap the bass unit to have something nice and flat to reflect the backwave. It makes no sense at all really. The diaphragm is only clamped on the sides so this creates an uneven range of motion while not really delivering on the promise of a wide sweet spot. Diffused is just that, diffused. A flat panel works as a piston while a curved unit doesn't have same simple movement. If you want a wide dispersion angle then the multi faceted way used by Sound Lab is the only proper way.

The basic model (all brown and British looking) looks like crap but some of the restored models look great. I've also been told that the new modernized version with 3um film is quite a bit better then the original which is no small feat. It also needs to be placed on stands to sound anywhere near its potential. The multiple diaphragms are to increase dynamics and bass output so they often used different diaphragm thickness depending on what they wanted each layer to do. A 12um diaphragms sound much thicker then a 3um film and if you take the tension into account you can tune the speaker relatively easily. Just to clarify the diaphragms all have + and - stators so you don't stack diaphragms one on top of the other. That wouldn't work. The problem is that the drivers are even harder to make, let alone to fix if something breaks down. Koss had major issues with their speakers and even sunk so low as to add a tweeter. There are a lot of different forces at play here so they need to be controlled. I did make a prototype of a dual diaphragm headphone driver and while it worked it would need months to perfect to find the right combo of diaphragm thickness and how taught they should be. It would be impossible (price wise) to do the time delay at line level as that would require lots of amps (4 per speaker) all with their own transformer and protective circuits. All the panels need to be fed their own signal so this would get big and heavy very quickly. It's too bad that nothing like this gets made so we are stuck with Martin Logan or yet another rehash of the ESL63. Stax also used resistor to control the dispersion of the "F" speaker line so that the flat panel would produce an arc wave form for a wider dispersion. This would be similar to what Peter Walker was planning to do with the flat panels on the sphere speaker. Curved speakers are a bad idea and I just don't get why M-L has stuck with it.

Peter Walker stacked the drivers in the same way Koss did with the Model 1 speaker i.e. multiple diaphragms one in front of the other. Sony also did the same thing with the extremely rare SS-R10 speakers but only Quad employed time delays (similar to the ones that drive the dispersion rings in the ESL63) to time the release and make a spherical wavefront. Whats amazing is that all the time delay stuff is analog and done with lots and lots of copper wire so this could be done today with DSP relatively easily. All electrostatics are directional unless the sound if fed through an acoustical lens like Beveridge for instance. The spherical wavefront would make them a bit less directional (like the ESL63 with its pseudo point source) but directionality is always an issue. The reason for the design was to make a smaller version of the ESL63 that would fit into more homes as the 63 is a pretty large and ugly beast. I'm not so sure a 60cm long sphere would have been that much better...

It's perfectly safe unless you touch it... It creeks and crackles so I'll scrap it but the charging time is very low and the coating presents no problems for the Stax bias supplies. I'd rate that as a success. I do have the "itch" to build some speakers as I was reading about Quads most impressive project, spherical ESL design with stacked diaphragms tied to a time delay. That means it throws sound into a room and the drivers can be smaller as they make up for the surface area by stacking. These were meant as replacements for the ESL63 but the tooling was very expensive and the build would require more precision then the Quad plant could muster so they scrapped them.

I meant swapping the + and - inputs at the speaker since they are most often push in connectors.

Ouch!!!

Phase issues would also be my guess. Try swapping at the drivers and see what happens.

Here is an electrostatic driver I threw together from some scrap materials tonight. I'm using it to test a new version of resistive coating so it wasn't built to sound good. It took 90 minutes to cobble together and most of that time was spent dealing with the damn WPI Stax plug... then I found a spare cable that could have saved me a lot of bother. It's brass stators, 3um mylar and the spacers are made out of stacked pieces of double sided glue. The spacers are about 0.55mm thick so the efficiency is just about the same as a Stax pro driver and it played just fine from my SRM-Xh.

The dark forces are colluding against us...

Just to clear this up, it is impossible for the electricity to jump from the driver to the ear with such low voltages. A direct conductor is needed as the low voltages can't break down the inherent resistance of the air (100v/mil).

The Stax should be 175$ or there abouts. The Hd580 some 100-150$ while the HF-1 will go for quite a bit if that hype hasn't died down. I have no idea about the others.

It's great to see some data to backup what we already knew about Ray's "design skills".

That would be my choice. There is some work being done to update and improve both the BH and the KGSS so the newer amps will be even better.

There aren't many of those around...

Thanks for a great read. It's a shame that it resembles that Rudistor mess over on HF where we have one side arguing the facts as they are and the other arguing that it sounds good to them and such crap. They only need to start that magic nonsense... I loved to read the reasons why those very good SS designers build SS gear instead of tube.

A normal raid NAS would probably be cheaper then the Apple stuff and work better. The problem with the cheap controllers is that they are cheap and break down all the time. I do prefer to run a full time server though as it is bigger and has 2 PSU's which required soldering and a bit of metalworking to fit. That's beyond being funny... Dayton-Wright did do some crazy things with airtight dust covers and filling the drivers with some gas to lower the arc threshold.

Yup, definitely crazy, but in a good way.

That is an awful lot of work for what is basically a Vampire socket (Vampire makes the Xhadows). There are also the Furutech's to consider even if they are horribly expensive.

I used to have a few of them as they were in the boxes when I got some of my amps but stock cables never last long with me. They are either used for some of my crazy ideas or friends are to cheap to buy their own. They were included with most of the older amps.

Two are being sold soon so I'll be down to my bare minimum of 8.

I don't have hundreds...(goes to count)... I only have 10 now here with me...

It's clear that you can't understand just how bad my condition is. I have a friend that does custom furniture so it's no problem to have a bunch of stands made out of maple or some other nice material. The problem is that Stax has a stand so my collection has to stand on them even if it costs me more then 1k$ to do so. This is the main reason why I've been streamlining collection so it will only contain Stax (all of them), Senn, Beyer and the Koss ESP950 when I buy it.

I wish my collection was that organized... I have a glass display case stacked with Stax headphones and a few on stands but it's a horrible way to store them. Those Stax stands get real expensive when you need 35 of them... \

Real men buy a sign for their collections!!

Dynamics... Who needs'em?