JimmyBox
Member
Read through the Renaissance ESL 15A review and the engineering still fascinates me. A 15 inch wide curvilinear electrostatic panel running from 300Hz all the way up with no crossover in the middle of the vocal range, roughly 690 square inches of radiating area, and a diaphragm quoted at 0.00048 inches, about an eighth the thickness of a hair. Below that it hands off to two 12 inch aluminum woofers covering 22 to 300Hz, each with its own 500 watt amp and its own enclosure, run by a DSP with Anthem room correction available. One power cord for the whole thing, which is a small mercy on a speaker that needs the panel energized.
It sits second from the top of the Masterpiece line, which runs from the $7,500 ESL 9 up to the $120,000 Neolith. No price for the 15A in what I read, so I am not going to guess at it.
Here is my hesitation, and it is a home cinema specific one. Everything that makes a big electrostatic magical for one listener works against a room with three seats across. The panel is deliberately controlled in its dispersion, so the person in the middle gets something the people on the ends do not, and a dipole wants real distance behind it, which fights with wherever your screen and center channel want to live. MartinLogan sells centers for exactly this reason, but a panel center under a screen is its own compromise.
Anyone running big MartinLogan panels in an actual multi seat theater rather than a two channel room? Did you end up treating the front wall behind them, and how bad is the falloff off axis in practice?
It sits second from the top of the Masterpiece line, which runs from the $7,500 ESL 9 up to the $120,000 Neolith. No price for the 15A in what I read, so I am not going to guess at it.
Here is my hesitation, and it is a home cinema specific one. Everything that makes a big electrostatic magical for one listener works against a room with three seats across. The panel is deliberately controlled in its dispersion, so the person in the middle gets something the people on the ends do not, and a dipole wants real distance behind it, which fights with wherever your screen and center channel want to live. MartinLogan sells centers for exactly this reason, but a panel center under a screen is its own compromise.
Anyone running big MartinLogan panels in an actual multi seat theater rather than a two channel room? Did you end up treating the front wall behind them, and how bad is the falloff off axis in practice?
