@tiggerfc, thanks for providing so much relevant information.
I’m always at least a little bit skeptical when a dealer suggests the speakers he sells, so I invite you to be more than a little bit skeptical of me.
Before I was a dealer, I bought a pair of big SoundLab curved-panel fullrange electrostats. This was in 1999. The only amplifier I had on hand was woefully underpowered, a bottom-of-the-line Adcom. The combination would not go much over conversational level, but the clarity and warmth and inner detail and timbral richness and bass articulation and spatial quality were all the best I had ever heard. I was so impressed that I changed careers and became a dealer.
These days I’ve added "loudspeaker manufacturer" to my resume’, but the SoundLabs are still the best speakers I know of at what they do well, and "what they do well" includes very low volume listening. In fact I have yet to hear their equal for very low volume listening. Many speakers which sound warm at medium and high volumes lose that at low volumes. At very low volume levels any midrange peaks tend to stick out moreso than at normal levels. This does not happen with SoundLabs. Their frequency response is incredibly smooth (the designer declines to post his data, but I have seen it in real time and it’s outstanding) so there are no peaks to stand out. The tonal balance remains the same as the volume level is turned down, to a greater degree than I have experienced with any other speaker, and this is one of the listening tests I do when seriously auditioning a speaker because it is predictive of long-term listening enjoyment.
The Sound Labs have a HUGE radiating area so there are no on-axis "hot spots" like with conventional speakers. At normal distances they behave like a line source, which means that the sound pressure level falls off by only 3 dB per doubling of distance, while for a conventional point-source speaker it’s 6 dB per doubling of distance. One result is that the sound field in the listening area "feels" like the sound field at a normal distance from a live performance. It’s a very different, and more natural, feeling compared to what you get with convention speakers.
One of my customers has (or "had", this was over a decade ago) a young son with a disability that makes it difficult for him to understand spoken words and virtually impossible for him to understand words over a sound system. With the SoundLabs his son was finally able to enjoy watching kids' movies and videos.
I think one of the reasons SoundLab speakers sound so natural is that their off-axis energy (including their backwave) has the same spectral balance as their first-arrival sound, so the reflections are welcome "signal" instead of unwelcome "noise". This enhances intelligibility and clarity (particularly at low levels) relative to conventional speakers, and contributes to their utter lack of listening fatigue.
SoundLabs can be had with either a 45-degree pattern width (front and back) or a 90-degree pattern width. For your application, I would suggest the 90-degree pattern width. This way more of the sound that reaches your ears will be lower-in-level reflected energy, so you would take in more sound energy for a given first-arrival sound pressure level.
Unfortunately SoundLabs are expensive, that’s just the nature of the beast, so they may not be a realistic option. If they are out of your price range then I do have an idea for a possible alternative, but it would be somewhat experimental.
Very best of luck in your quest.
Duke
dealer/manufacturer/SoundLab fanboy
