about 10 yrs ago I owned a pair of Martin Logan SL-3's electrostats which incorporate a 10" woofer which I really enjoyed but they were somewhat obstrusive physically (living room-wise) & the prime listening sweet spot was rather narrow. I always drove them with solid state amps Classe CA 200 or a Pass Labs X250 w/tube preamps which was recommended (never tried tube amps w/them). In time I began to worry about having to replace the diaphrams eventually & I always thought it was an added aggravation to have each of them plugged into an outlet.
If I were to consider a new pair of speakers they'd have to be south of $5K budget-wise for me to consider.
HI Patrick,
Thanks for the post, hope the RM-10 is working well.
Martin Logan had a bad time with diaphragms I believe because they wanted to make them "see through". That was a bad idea, it cost them a lot, though I think they now have it under control. Here's a sad case where the "look" or a speaker was more important than the longevity.
Other than their full range CLS I do not consider the Martin Logans to be real electrostats. I prefer to call them a cone speaker with an electrostatic tweeter. They continue to brag about raising the crossover point up around 800 HZ last I heard. Well that's certainly up in the mid-range. To make thing worse, the woofer is down at the floor. One can never create a realistic image with mid-range instruments and vocals coming off the floor.
From Martin Logans own website the explain how they spend some $100,000 to make a chamber to sputter metal on Mylar to a thinness that was virtually transparent. The point of a coating on the diaphragm is to get the charge out there and have it stay in one place. To do that metal has to be so thin that it easily disappears over time. Traditionally carbon is used as it is resistive, you can put enough on there to really stay, but you can't see through it.
I did a little reading at the ML website, it's just as slick as the speakers and just as wrong. They write that electrical recordings were available in 1921, (1925 is the correct date, though it was kept secret till 1926 so as not to hurt the sales of acoustical recordings). They say Rice and Kellogg worked for Bell Labs when in fact they worked for General Electric and they had a 200 watt! amplifier where the amplifier was actually one watt, quite a lot for that day. They think the first ESL was developed in the 1920 when in fact an ESL speaker/microphone combination was developed for the telephone in the late 1800's.
http://www.martinlogan.com/learn/electrostatic-loudspeaker-history.phpOn the subject of diaphragms, I am using 1/2 mill Mylar (the real stuff from DuPont), which has an over 35 year history of reliability. I have never seen a Mylar diaphragm split or fail in a constant charge speaker. I offer Acoustat as the prime example. I am told that they built over 100,000 transducers with Mylar and an opaque, non metal coating. I have a dozen Acoustat panels in my attic that have been subject to 20 years of daily swings from 120 to 30 degrees. They are all fine, I was just playing with them the other day as I am working on a 5,000 volt direct-drive amp for several Acoustat owners who have approached me to do so.
What was the problem with having them plugged in? It's just 2 watts.
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