Best amps to drive Electrostats

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planet10

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Re: Best amps to drive Electrostats
« Reply #40 on: 3 Aug 2021, 06:21 pm »
The different types of commercial and DIY ESL's present different loads to an amplifier.

While true in a general sense an ESL presents a capacitive load.

Given that P = Voltage * Current * cos(phase difference between the 2).

Assumming we are dealing with voltage amps with low Rout that means that the amplifier needs to be able to deliver significant current despite the cap load.

You will not find a specification for this but you are usually ;ooking for something with a significantly beefy power supply.

I have not used ESLs in a long time, but back when we were selling Dayton-Wrights, the big boys (lots of 200+ w amps coming out at the time) did not do the job well, the surprise was that teh NAIM 250 drove them, even a set in parallel, seemingly with ease.

You are looking for an amplifier that can deliver lots of extra current.

dave

joulewrangler

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Re: Best amps to drive Electrostats
« Reply #41 on: 13 Nov 2021, 02:45 pm »
I have had great success driving SoundLab M-1 speakers with Parasound JC-1 mono block amplifiers; the depth of image, bass control, and sound staging all excellent. I had used Innersound ESL amps, and also found them to be “flattened” in perspective / cool sounding, and generally not a good match, though they did have lots of power as noted by an earlier poster.