[*Scotty*]

Steve at one point in the 80s Sound Lab made a pair of electrostatic sub-woofers,as I recall they were about six foot square panels. I only heard them once at CES and they were very impressive.
If you were going go di-pole that would be the whole ball of wax.
Scotty

[josh358]

The MAggie's are very good speakers but it helps to kiss HP's derriere and place ads if you want good reviews. I trust the word's of owners over magazine's with a commercial interest.

Well, I won't get into that controversy, because I'm not in a position to know. But if you're interested in independent sources, check out E-Stat's account, he was at HP's house not long ago and wrote, "From the outset, what you will find is that all three of his systems are phenomenally transparent. I do not use that adjective lightly. Play any piece of music that you know intimately and you will hear detail that you’ve never heard before":

http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/vt.mpl?f=critics&m=55529

[SteveFord]

Kevinh,
I'd been thinking along those same lines - these guys are full of it - as just about every review, about anything, in TAS is a rave.
I finally got so curious that I checked out my local dealer to hear for myself and you know what? 
They're right - the new speakers are that good and so was most of the stuff that was on demo.  The Cambridge Audio 840 Azur CD player and the ARC LS27 (I believe) were really impressive, the Rogue amp was too puny.
Audio gear has just come such a long ways since I was the proud owner of a second hand pair of Large Advents, a Kenwood 60W integrated amp and a Dual 701; I think that the reason everything is a rave is the magazines pick and choose as to what is worth reviewing and shy away from the junky stuff.
It's also a business but in the case of TAS reviews they are giving it to you straight from what I can see. 
If it makes their Recommended Components list I'm pretty confident that you can take that one to the bank and no, nobody pays me.  It would be nice if they would but no, it's a cold, cruel world.

Six foot electrostatic subwoofers, you say? 

P.S.
I don't want to know about HP wearing anything phenominally transparent.  Ick.

[kevinh]

The Sub was called the B1 IIRC, it was the same height as the A1 ~7ft high, it was 44 in wide. What distinguished it from the regular panels is that it used a dual diaphragm.  I believe that they will still build these on request.

I would love to hear them set up as per Earl Geddes (ie 3 subs) with the Main Panels run full range. 

[*Scotty*]

kevinh                         ,

The Sub was called the B1 IIRC, it was the same height as the A1 ~7ft high, it was 44 in wide.

This squares with about what I remember from so many years ago, the subs were placed behind the main speakers and occupied over 1/2 the width of the room and they were as tall as the speakers in front of them.
 The images in the sound stage were life sized and the sound was very dynamic,not polite or restrained. The system created a room filling coherent sound field, I couldn't hear where the main speaker crossed over into the sub at all.
Scotty

[kevinh]

Part of this is the number of square inches for the bass using the B1'a. Some users are doing what Ray Kimber does and using dual 945's as a single speaker, Since the panels go down to 24Hz, the number of db's are limited by the size of the radiating surface.

I think covering the entire freq range without a crossover is am important part of their coherence.

[SteveFord]

The wife has already weighed in on the SoundLabs:
"I'm gonna kill ya"!
I don't think that I can pretend that I didn't understand what she really meant...

[Duke]

This squares with about what I remember from so many years ago, the subs were placed behind the main speakers and occupied over 1/2 the width of the room and they were as tall as the speakers in front of them.
 The images in the sound stage were life sized and the sound was very dynamic,not polite or restrained. The system created a room filling coherent sound field, I couldn't hear where the main speaker crossed over into the sub at all.

I remember reading an account of someone's first experience hearing one of those old SoundLab systems with the huge separate electrostatic subs.   The owner played some organ music at fairly high level, and on a certain note the person's vision literally went blurry.  Later I read that the resonant frequency of the human eyeball is 19 Hz, so I bet the note in question had a 19 Hz fundamental. 

[Rclark]

If I was in the market, I would definitely be auditioning Soundlabs, and also KingSound looks very interesting.

 Maybe in like ten years, if we're all still around.

[OzarkTom]

My top pick in planers is still the 1978 Acoustat Monitor III's with DD servo OTL amps. That is the speaker to locate if by chance. There are no cross-overs and no transformers in the signal path. These had the best bass, dynamics, and detail of any planer ever made. It sure is sad the company gave up on them in the early 80's and went with transformers.