Small Room

Please let us know how things work out.

Your room is sized a lot like my second listening room, so our problems are similar. My own solution is quite different from yours, but I didn't start out with six-foot high panel speakers with 10-inch woofers.

As you know, electrostatic panels are dipoles--they radiate sound front and back. This means they need space all around, they don't like being placed close to a wall. You could experiment, and you might come up with a near-wall placement you liked. However ideally they would be as much as a third of the way into the room.

If you placed them along the long wall, then, you would be pretty much doomed to nearfield listening, as in a studio monitoring setup. Smaller speakers are really better for nearfield. It takes a certain distance to hear an integrated sound from many speakers, especially panels.

Short wall placement might be the best compromise. Again, they will not like being close to a wall, though. You will need to experiment, but the solution may involve placing them 18 to 27 inches away from the side walls, which will narrow your soundstage a lot.

Do you see that the problem is a little like stuffing a gallon into a pint jar? Your Dynastats were really built for a larger room.

Those woofers will overload the room quickly as you turn up the volume. I think you are right to consider acoustic treatment--at least one and preferably two corner bass traps, and something to control highs at the wall boundaries and corners. If you placed the speakers at null points ( see the "Speaker positioning" links at the Audio Asylum FAQ ) that might help.

Why don't you contact the manufacturer and see what advice they can give?