I have not heard the Sound Lab Ultimate One that Albert Porter speaks of, nor his Viva amps mentioned elsewhere, but I do own a pair of (budget?) fifteen grand Sound Lab Millennium One's. This is essentially the same speaker with a less rigid frame. They bring tears to my eyes. Wish I had discovered Sound Lab years ago. For twenty years I designed and built my own loudspeakers. Essentially there are two things a speaker has to get right: Resolution (transient response) and tonal balance (frequency response). Of the two, tonal balance is the more fundamental. Now here's the great secret: You cannot have correct tonal balance without a correct radiation pattern. A correct radiation pattern would be one that is uniform with respect to frequency - that is, equally directional at all frequencies. Impossible with conventional speakers. Possible with true omnis or with full range horns (such as Klipschorns), and also possible with a large curved dipole - which is what guru Roger West uses in Sound Labs. The natural figure-eight bass radiation of the dipole is maintained on up through the mids and highs by the curved geometry (Martin CLS's aren't curved nearly enough to achieve this). This also gives outstanding imaging over a very large listening area. Now, why does radiation pattern matter? Why can't a conventional speaker, or planar magnetic/ribbon speaker, simply be "voiced" for natural tonal balance? The reason is that your ears take into account both the first arrival sound and the reverberant field, and when there is a discrepancy in tonal balance between the two your ear/brain can tell it's a fake. Get the tonal balance the same in both fields, and the illusion becomes so convincing it's scary. So if you have conventional speakers (omnidirectional in the bass, hemispherical in the mids, and directional in the highs) there is no way to voice them for a truly natural tonal balance. Now, remember that resolution is the other critical factor in sound quality - electrostatics outperform everything else in this area, so when Roger West solved the tonal balance/radiation pattern puzzle he ended up with the most intelligent and elegant solution yet presented to the challenge of how to convincingly recreate the experience of live music. Roger went on to refine and tweak this most elegant design over something like eighteen years, resulting in the Ulitmate One and the Millennium One, both variations on the classic A-1. Sound Labs combines the very best of what electrostatics excel at with a geometry that takes them into a league all their own. You can listen standing up or sitting down, anywhere in the room, or even in the next room. There's nothing like them out there.
