In your price range, a dynamic or planar magnetic speaker has an advantage: No power supply or transformer needed. An electrostat has to have a power supply and an impedance-matching transformer, so before the panels are even built there's a significant cost incurred. Relatively speaking this cost is fairly small on a high-priced electrostat, but gobbles up a very disproportionate piece of the pie in the lower price ranges. So if I was looking to spend two grand ballpark on a new pair of dipole speakers, I'd lean towards the Maggie 1.6 instead of an electrostat.
If you don't have your heart set on "new", then the original Quad ESL, the "57", is a possibility. A refurbished pair in good condition would probably be under two grand. Even today, it's pretty much the standard for comparison in natural-sounding midrange.
The InnerSound Isis hybrid brings enormous improvements in dynamic capability compared to the old Quads, but at the expense of a pretty much one-person-wide sweet spot. Not that the Quads have all that big a sweet spot either, come to think of it.
Note that with hybrids, the challenge is getting a good balance between woofer and panel. This is harder than it sounds because their sound propagation characteristics are very different. Briefly, the panel's output decays in loudness more slowly with distance than the woofer's output does. So distance and room acoustics play a much greater role in the sound of a hybrid than with most other speakers. Just for fun, skim the internet and read what people say about Martin Logans. Some say they have too much bass, some too little, and some say just right. Very few speakers generate such a wide range of opinions as to their tonal balance. The reason? Their tonal balance changes significantly with listening distance and room acoustics. If you do go for a hybrid, make sure the relative level of woofer and panel can be adjusted across a wide range.
If 'twere my money, I'd probably go for refurbished Quad 57's or Maggies.
Best of luck to you!
Duke
If you don't have your heart set on "new", then the original Quad ESL, the "57", is a possibility. A refurbished pair in good condition would probably be under two grand. Even today, it's pretty much the standard for comparison in natural-sounding midrange.
The InnerSound Isis hybrid brings enormous improvements in dynamic capability compared to the old Quads, but at the expense of a pretty much one-person-wide sweet spot. Not that the Quads have all that big a sweet spot either, come to think of it.
Note that with hybrids, the challenge is getting a good balance between woofer and panel. This is harder than it sounds because their sound propagation characteristics are very different. Briefly, the panel's output decays in loudness more slowly with distance than the woofer's output does. So distance and room acoustics play a much greater role in the sound of a hybrid than with most other speakers. Just for fun, skim the internet and read what people say about Martin Logans. Some say they have too much bass, some too little, and some say just right. Very few speakers generate such a wide range of opinions as to their tonal balance. The reason? Their tonal balance changes significantly with listening distance and room acoustics. If you do go for a hybrid, make sure the relative level of woofer and panel can be adjusted across a wide range.
If 'twere my money, I'd probably go for refurbished Quad 57's or Maggies.
Best of luck to you!
Duke