Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris19 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Can anyone else offer an explanation of speed? Anyone who has heard electrostats, perhaps?
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Hey don't look at me, I have exactly zero technical knowledge
but speed I think is simply how quickly a diaphragm responds to the signal. An electrostatic diaphragm is nearly weightless and will therefore dissipate energy much faster and will respond to any minute oscillation in the signal, whereas a dynamic membrane has a heavy voice coil on it and tends to build up a lot more momentum, which makes it very difficult to follow minute subtle changes in the signal especially when there is already a lot going on.
In listening terms, Chris19 has it exactly right and the more you overload a slow transducer the more details begin to be lost, and the details to go are the ones that are obscured by other layers. When you have slow, transparent music you really don't feel it very much which is why I cringe whenever people use the typical smooth jazz and acoustic vocal recordings to evaluate gear. This type of music doesn't really evaluate anything besides midrange tone, treble resolution, and overall frequency response, and few people outside of musicians, producers, and regular acoustic concert goers have any idea what natural tone is really supposed to be like in the first place. But when you listen to an electrostat, music can get as fast and as hectic as possible and you can still hear every single detail on every single layer, and there is no detail blurring whatsoever. Things simply stay transparent and clear throughout with any genre, and when you play metal you can hear the texture on every single cymbal and the reverb on every single drumstroke, and when you play large-scale orchestral pieces you can hear the texture on every single violin/viola/cello/etc that makes up the string section. You can tell exactly what row and what row position every musician was in, you can tell how things were mic'd, and you can feel the size of the venue and its acoustic characteristics. Of course you can do that too on a top dynamic system that is fast, but dynamics simply cannot reach the speed and resolution under load that electrostatics are capable of by design. Even the Qualia 010, which is as detailed as an electrostatic under a lighter load, cannot cope with complex music as well as a 'stat.
'Stats have their own problems and the driver has very limited excursion by design, so you have issues with sub-bass reproduction as well as tactile impact. The drivers simply struggle to displace a lot of air and you have to have very large driver surfaces to compensate, or try and increase driver/stator gap up to maximum theoretical limits, and all of this presents its own set of design problems and a very difficult load for an amplifier besides. The O2 Mk1 breaks new ground in terms of tactile impact and sub-bass presentation for an electrostat, but in turn it presents a massively challenging load for any amplifier which is why only a few amps (717, KGSS, BH/BHSE, possibly new Woo amp) will do.
Edit: The TakeT H2 piezoelectric ribbon driver is actually very fascinating because it has both the speed of an electrostatic and the excursion of a dynamic, in fact it has even
more tactile impact than your typical dynamic. But, it also presents a very unique set of challenges of an amplifier and there really isn't anything on the market that can drive it properly besides the fairly undersized and underpowered transformer box that it comes with.
