My two cents; please offer comments on my comments. From a purely engineering standpoint I would think that OTL's would be one of the worst choices in the world to team up with an electrostatic speaker. Now let me say I have heard the Statements before but it was with krell and vtl.
I have never heard stats with an OTL but I'm aware that a good number of people aware by this combination. I personally think what they are hearing is the hi-frequent roll-off that one will see with these two technologies.
OTL's have relatively high output impedance's and like to see as high a load impedance as possible, now take note that electrostats behave more and more like be capacitors the higher in frequency you go i.e. the higher the frequency the lower the impedance into the speaker. Starting to see my point...? Amp with high output impedance and a speaker with a vanishing impedance as the frequency goes up, now what you have a is a 1st order HF filter with the amps impedance consuming more of the power than is being delivered to the speaker.
I would imagine the properties that advocates of this combination laud is one of sweetness and presence (with no harshness or rather what is perceived to be a dirth of anything offensive) which can certainly appear to be the case when the treble is rolled off.
Not trying to start a fight but after waiting literally for years for someone smarter than me to point this out I thought I would finally put it out and get seom feedback on your collective thoughts :)
Thanks and happy listening
I have never heard stats with an OTL but I'm aware that a good number of people aware by this combination. I personally think what they are hearing is the hi-frequent roll-off that one will see with these two technologies.
OTL's have relatively high output impedance's and like to see as high a load impedance as possible, now take note that electrostats behave more and more like be capacitors the higher in frequency you go i.e. the higher the frequency the lower the impedance into the speaker. Starting to see my point...? Amp with high output impedance and a speaker with a vanishing impedance as the frequency goes up, now what you have a is a 1st order HF filter with the amps impedance consuming more of the power than is being delivered to the speaker.
I would imagine the properties that advocates of this combination laud is one of sweetness and presence (with no harshness or rather what is perceived to be a dirth of anything offensive) which can certainly appear to be the case when the treble is rolled off.
Not trying to start a fight but after waiting literally for years for someone smarter than me to point this out I thought I would finally put it out and get seom feedback on your collective thoughts :)
Thanks and happy listening