What is your opinion regarding electrostatics?

Several thoughts, my system uses Crosby Quad 63's and Entec LF40's. After many years of moving the Quads around my 19' by 29' room, they are currently sitting a little more than 8' from the back wall and about 4' from the side walls, toed in toward the listening position. Demian Martin of Entec has visited my home two times and he feels strongly that any dipile should be a minimum of 8' out from the real wall to insure enough time lag between the direct sound and the first reflection so that the ear does not confuse them, otherwise imaging will suffer. I guess that the same result could be accomplished by attenuating the back wave with damping mayerial; however, in my room that seems to suck the life out of the sound. After much experimentation, I have ended up with two 8" diffusors centered on the wall behind the speakers and a single custom 16" deep diffusor in each corner of the room. I also use 5 of the Argent Room lenses and two custom 16' resonators in the corners behind my listening position.

Even with the subs the Quads do not play at really loud levels, but up to f, they are great at differentiating dynamics. This is particularly true from p to ppp.

I found it particularly difficult to seemlessly mate a sub with the Quads, but am reasonably pleased with the latest Entecs which incorporate less motional feedback than their predecessors (yes, the subs still sometimes outpace the dynamics of the Quads).

Last, the outboard crossover that came with the Entecs was horrible and colored the sound of the Quads. At present I use a teflon cap at the input of my amp and a separate attenuator that is in series only with the subs to set levels.

Hi Fcrowder, your findings go parallel with my experimenting and I also found, that the Quads should be moved well into the room for a good compromise between holographic imaging and ambience retrieval. I have record shelves with LPs on my back wall from the floor to the ceiling and they do very well as difusors. On the side walls I have those made by Gryphon in Denmark at the critical points of reflection. I also found the external crossovers of the E. sadly lacking and hence never used their highpass side. Seamlessly blending subs with stators is an absolute pain, especially in my configuration. It took me about a year and a pair of old Maggie bass panels, as well as cutting my subs off at the lowest possible frequency and lots of moving around and quite a bit of room treatment, until I was (more or less) happy.
I've never experienced however, that my subs were faster than my stators. But then I never cranked my subs volume up very high. It was the contrary which practically drove me nuts and forced me to try unusal ways, like blending in the the Maggies between the stators and the subs.

Sorry i left you hanging on some questions / statements folks. As to why i'm opting for e-stat's for the tweeters, let's just say i ran across a great deal on a good quantity of small electrostatic tweeter panels made by RTR. While i think that they will work well enough, i can always throw something in their place if need be. I have always wanted to "play around with" some plasma tweeters though and have a very good source for some Ionovac's that are still sealed in their original boxes.

As to mid's and upper bass, i will probably use some large e-stat panels. Possibly something equivalent or similar to stacked Quads. I'm working on that situation now.

I have NO idea what i'm going to do for subs at this point in time. One thing is for sure though, they will be sealed or transmission lines and make use of multiple drivers.

I recently stumbled across ( quite literally ) some very unique RTR subs that were supposedly quite fast and musical in their day, but they are in need of MAJOR work.

I've got the amps that i intend to use along with the preamp and electronic crossover. I'll be tri-amping with mono-blocks, so it should be pretty interesting when all is said and done. Regardless of what i use for speakers or raw drivers, i will have enough power on hand to drive whatever i want. I am a BIG fan of "horsepower" so long as it is "clean". I just have to work on all of the rest of the details now and find some place to put it when it's all done : ) Sean
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Sean, congrats for finding those RTRs. Those panels are excellent and I think, they should "work well enough", as you put it. In their heydays they easily held their own against those famed Decca ribbons, were certainly better than the Sequerra ribbons I used later. Unfortunatedly I blew one after the other, with my " experimenting". Weren't they used for the high end of those memorable Servo-Statics, made by Infinity in the seventies? What you're building up, seems somehow familiar. Wished I could hear it, when you're happy with it.
Cheers Detlof

i have owned thiels ,bws,vandersteins,maggies,jm labs,but i keep coming back to martin logans i have owned 7 pairs they must be doing some thing right, p.s. listen to the oydessys