Your favorite Electrostatic, Panel spkr

Electrostatics have numerous issues...power handling and shrillness on some recordings. They are good, but tend to be very tiring to listen to over time and at volume.

This depends, like so many things, on execution. Sound Labs have no problem handling power and don't get shrill. You can play them all day no worries. But I do know what you're talking about- I've also heard ESLs that seemed to me to be a bit bright.

We've been in business 43 years. Over that time, we've had lots of customers with ESLs- OTLs and ESLs have been the match made in heaven (sound wise, anyway) since the ESL57 was first introduced.

I've heard a lot of ESLs with our amps at customer's homes and also at audio shows. IME/IMO Sound Lab is the state of the art in ESLs- they play the widest bandwidth and most dynamic range of any ESL made. A recent change in them (about 4-5 years ago) also made them fairly easy to drive.

FWIW, ESLs behave differently from box speakers in that the impedance curve is based on a capacitor rather than a driver in a box (with its resulting resonance). This should be fairly obvious, but the take home is that the speaker is thus best driven by an amplifier that can make constant power rather than constant voltage, due to the opening statement in this paragraph. Since most amplifiers are intended to be voltage sources (example: a solid state amp that can double its power as impedance is halved), they will tend to sound bright on an ESL and also lack bass impact. This is because the ESL impedance curve typically varies by about 9 or 10:1 from the bass frequencies to the highs.


When you get a Sound Lab set up properly, you will find it to be one of the fastest and most transparent speakers made.