electrostats vs ribbon drivers

Mrtennis, you go to great lengths to further ruin your reputation in this forum....

I have owned several pairs of electrostats and they can also sound very hot up top. I have owned several pairs of Martin Logans before I bought my first ribbon speakers a pair of Magnepan 2.7 and they blew away the Martin Logan's at 4 times the retail price of the 2.7s. I would have not bought the Magnepans but friend was in desperate need of money so I bought them and was pleasantly surprised. I have owned several pairs of Magnepans through out the years but now I have a pair of Speakers built by Rich Murry of True Soundworks that are like Apogee Duetta Signatures but all made from scratch and these are the best Ribbon speakers I have heard. I am not saying the best I am just saying "The Best I Have Heard"

i have ownend two different versions of magnepans and listened to many others at shows . i have heard the analysis speakers at shows and also at the importer's house. i used tubes on the maggies.

i have many ribbons at shows and have found the treble sounded elevated.

i have speakers with ribbon tweeters and again, i found them peaky.

i will admit that it is my ears and my opinion..

others may differ.

i realize in this hobby there is much contention about the sound of stereo systems, so i suspect there will be disagreement with my premise.

Personally I can't say that your impressions are universally true based on my experiences Mr. Tennis. When I think of "hot" in planer/ribbon/electrostatic designs the first one that comes to mind is the original Martin Logan CLS from the mid 80's. Unfortunately I feel much of what I perceived as it being "hot" was the fact that there was so little low frequency information and it just didn't have a balanced presentation. I really didn't like it or the Sequel for that matter and because of those early experiences never though much of Martin Logan although I heard a few budget models years later where this impression wasn't the same.

So far as ribbons, I have listened to numerous Apogee models over the years and NEVER perceived the top to be hot. I would think if they did sound that way it could be a synergy issue with the amp maybe? A pair of Agogee Stages (2K retail at the time) still conjures up some of the best high frequency performance I've ever heard from any speaker at any price point. There was also a Clements speaker, can't remember the model number, that used a ribbon tweeter and it was not at all hot, actually I thought it was quite impressive how the tweeter blended with the dynamic drivers in that design.

Set up properly, Maggies are not necessarily 'hot'.
They actually have a slight rise in the bass end to compensate for the cancelation that occurs from front / back interaction. Listen to the exact edge of the panel and you will hear......nothing. The front / back wave cancel one another.

That being said, one of the big debates of panel users is the resistor which on many models can be inserted in the tweeter circuit. The 1.6s, for example, came with 1 ohm resistors.

I, too, found my 1.6s to be hot when I first set them up. Beamy, too. It was impossible to get a wide stage and not too hot. Opening up the toe would help, but the sweetspot was TINY.

Finally, during lots of reading and listening to others, I was made aware of the fact that OLD panels had the POLE PIECE forward...to the listener. New designs feature the MYLAR side to the listener. To me, flipping the panels to listen to them 'old school' made all the difference. Wider sweet spot and much less hot. No resistor needed.

Also, since the crossover on many Magnepan models is Asymmetric....I have a 12db slope on the low pass and 6db slope on the high pass, the low and high drivers are out of phase. Since the drivers are beside one another, one is slightly leading, the other lagging by the amont of phase difference caused by the crossover. Tweeter IN or OUT makes the difference. That's all I can think of to account for the greater clarity with tweeter 'in'.

EXPERIMENT away freely. This will apply to ALL magnepan models except the 20.1, which is a push / pull driver and has a pole piece on each side.

When in doubt? Ignore the directions. And get rid of that fuse, while you're at it. Too much extra wire and many more connections just muck things up. BE CAREFUL!