Electrostatic pros and cons.

The strengths of electrostats usually include superb inner detail and articulation, low coloration, very good to superb imaging, and excellent pitch definition in the bass region. They tend to sound startlingly natural.

The weaknesses of electrostats relative to good traditional box speakers usually include more modest SPL capabilities, reduced low-end extension and reduced low-end impact, more difficult load for the amplifier (which translates into higher amplifier cost), requiring a lot of room for proper setup, small sweet spot, and reduced reliability. Also, electrostats tend to be fairly expensive, as building an electrostatic speaker is quite labor-intensive. It means building very large drivers basically from scratch.

There are exceptions to some of the above weaknesses. The big SoundLabs I used to sell had excellent bass extension and a larger sweet spot than most "conventional" speakers; the Beveridges an even larger sweet spot; and some Acoustats and Roger Sanders’ designs are capable of very high SPLs.

Any full-range dipole speaker benefits from being positioned fairly far out into the room. The reason is, if the backwave reflection off the wall behind the speakers arrives too early, it can be detrimental. But if it arrives after a long enough time delay, it is beneficial. Ime 3 feet is borderline; if you can’t position dipole speakers at least 3 feet out from the wall, they are probably not going to work very well in your room. Ime 5 feet is significantly better than 3 feet.

Duke

The main pro I would say is the very low distortion with their air-damped diaphragm.

The strengths of electrostats usually include superb inner detail and articulation, low coloration, very good to superb imaging, and excellent pitch definition in the bass region. They tend to sound startlingly natural.

The smoothest measured in-room frequency response I have ever seen was a SoundLab panel set up in Roger West’s open-floor factory. They ran pink noise through it and I was watching the real-time analyzer display. There was no smoothing and no time gating. The curve was a gently downward-sloping virtually straight line, down maybe 5 dB at 20 kHz relative to 100 Hz, spoiled only by a 2.5 dB up, 2.5 dB down jog at about 500 Hz.

The 500 Hz jog was narrow enough that it might have disappeared almost entirely with 1/3 octave smoothing, which is more representative of what we perceive than is an unsmoothed curve.

I asked Roger why he didn’t use these measurements in his marketing, His reply was, because someone else might get a different curve with their measuring system and accuse him of exaggerating.

When I was a SoundLab dealer, from time to time I'd have other well-respected speakers in the same room.  Usually these other speakers were more efficient than the SoundLabs.  But invariably I'd find myself turning up the other speakers even louder in an effort to hear the details which were clear on the SoundLabs even at their lower sound pressure level. 

Duke