Electrostatic-vs-Planar strength, weakness

I hope you don't mind a dealer's $.02. I'll try not to be too partisan here...

I've owned Maggies MMG, 12, 1.6, and 3.6. I've owned electrostat/dynamic hybrids made by Martin Logan and Sound Lab (I'm a dealer for the latter). I've owned full-range electrostats from Quad and of course Sound Lab.

Your question focuses on electrostatic/dynamic hybrids vs full-range planar magnetics (Maggies), and as you could probably guess each excels in different areas. Electrostatic elements in my opinion usually give superior resolution of low-level detail. Some electrostat hybrids give you a small sweet spot (InnerSound), some a medium sized sweet spot (Martin Logan), and some a fairly large sweet spot (Sound Lab). Maggies are capable of giving you you a fairly good sized sweet spot.

The bass of a good box woofer (such as InnerSound's transmission line system) will go deeper and have more solid impact than a dipole bass system (like the Maggies), but dipole bass in my experience does a very good job with pitch definition.

Now the achilles' heel of a hybrid system is the difficulty in blending the point-source woofer with the line-source (and sometimes narrow-pattern) panel. Not only to they have very different sonic signatures, they actually propagate sound differently! That's right - the sound pressure level actually falls off more rapidly with distance from the woofer than from the panel. So either you want to be able to adjust the relative levels of woofer and panel for your room and listening distance, or you want to do a very good job of choosing the right hybrid speaker for your room.

Once I had a pair of Maggie 3.6's side-by-side with Sound Lab Dynastats in my living room. So I had the chance to do some in-depth comparisons. One thing I quickly noticed was that I really had to do a good job of dialing in the controls on the Dynastats, for the overall tonal balance of the Maggies was very nice. The Maggies were the more forgiving speaker, but they did give up some harmonic richness and texture to the Dynastats, and the Dynastats were more lively at low volume levels. The Dynastats went quite a bit deeper as would be expected, but the Maggies were more coherent. Unfortunately (for me as a dealer), you could hear the discontinuity between the Dynastat's woofer and panel. The Maggies had no such issues. So there wasn't a clear winner - each did some things better.

I'm not sure what your price range is, but you might consider Quads as a possible alternative to hybrids or Maggies.

Best of luck in your quest!

Duke LeJeune
AudioKinesis

Mikesinger brings up questions about the reliability of Sound Lab speakers, and says that a local dealer "stopped carrying the line due to horrible/slow/rude service."

Let me address the dealer's characterization of Sound Lab's service first, and then I'll address the reliability issue.

In the five or six years I've been a Sound Lab customer and dealer, I've never known them to be rude or horrible, nor unnecessarily slow (sometimes they have to wait on a part and that can slow things down). I've seen them bend over backwards (often without the customer's knowledge) to take care of people. I've seen them eat the costs of damage that was not their fault (such as shipping damage). Sound Lab has been in business since the 1970's, and companies don't last that long without taking care of their customers. So while I don't know the details of the specific incidents that led Mikesinger's dealer to characterize Sound Lab's service as "horrible/slow/rude", my own experiences lead me to believe that there may well be another side to the story. Sound Lab has taken care of every customer of mine that ever had a problem.

Sound Lab has at times had reliability problems due to inconsistencies in insulation material (and occasionally in power supplies, but that's a relatively easy fix). Sometimes a formerly good insulation supplier's quality control goes down, resulting in insulation that would pass an initial test but later fail in the field. I suspect Mikesinger's dealer carried the line at a time when they were struggling with insulation issues. A couple of years ago Roger West and a team of chemists set out to develop an insulation material that would be as close as possible to ideal, along with the manufacturing and assembly processes that would eliminate microbubbles or other minisucle flaws in the material that could lead to insulation failure. Since the introduction of these new materials and processes a little over a year ago, to the best of my knowledge there have been no insulation failures that were not due to outside damage (such as a crated panel being dropped off the back of a delivery truck, or a forklift spearing a shipping crate).

In my experience, most of the problems arising in older Sound Labs appear after a pair has been shipped without the factory crates. So if you ever go shopping for a used pair, place a high priority on either having them properly crated or delivered by someone who knows what they're doing (wrapping in bubble wrap and handing them over to Mangle Freight is a recipe for disaster). I've delivered several pairs personally without the factory crates with nary a glitch, and would be happy to share details of how to pack them in a trailer or van for safe transportation.

I have owned seven pairs of Sound Labs, and all of them are still in service (six with their new owners). Two of the earlier pairs had to have insulation repairs under warranty, and one pair was dropped in shipment and had to have the diaphragms re-tensioned (done at the factory, but if I'd known what the problem was I could have done it myself).

That being said, I will concede that Maggies are indeed reliable and relatively easy to service.

Duke