Free Electrostat speakers and parts, Cincinnati/Dayton area

[bwaslo]

Free to a good home or even a not-so-good home. I have a set of ESL speakers I made years ago. I don't need/want them anymore, but don't want to send them to the dump, a lot of sweat and $$ was put into them. There was an article on them in Speaker Builder.

The way they are arranged looks good, but is "experimental" (meaning you'd probably want to change it, they're hyperdirectional as they are). They are made as a bunch of smallish panels (16x 14"x7" panels for midrange arrays), with a curved ESL tweeter, good quality audio step-up transformers (and a spare pair of transformers as well), HV bias supplies, spare roll of mylar film, some insulator foam tape, crossover stuff. When last turned on (years ago) they sounded very good if you sat in just the right place, but now who knows.... They've been taking up space in the basement. Mostly this is probably as parts for someone who wants to work with ESLs, there's enough here to make a pretty decent set I think.

They're about 6ft tall, maybe 20 inches wide (see photo), but not too heavy. To get them out, you'll need a truck or van because of their size. And you'll have to take it all, no picking and choosing.

I'm about 15 minutes south of the Parts Express Springboro store. Maybe someone coming to the Tent Sale next weekend can swing by and take them off my hands? Please??

[[email protected]]

Re: Free Electrostat speakers and parts, Cincinnati/Dayton area

I'll give them a good home! Drop me an email at [email protected] and I'll swing by during the week sometime to get them.

[bwaslo]

Re: Free Electrostat speakers and parts, Cincinnati/Dayton area

Done! Thanks Mike, it would've driven me nuts to just set them out by the curb...

[johnpastuck]

Re: Free Electrostat speakers and parts, Cincinnati/Dayton area

I recognize those. I've been working on a focused array for the last year
after reading your articles. Have you abandonded the idea?

John

[bwaslo]

Re: Free Electrostat speakers and parts, Cincinnati/Dayton area

Hi John,

Well, yes and no. They do what they're intended to do, which is to mostly eliminate the effects of room reflections in their frequency ranges. They do a great job of sounding like "you are there" as opposed to "the musicians are in my living room". But so can headphones. And that's not the only similarity, unfortunately -- for both headphones and focused arrays your head has to be in just the right position with respect to the speakers for them to work right. So they end up being one person, or at most two-person, listening speakers. Or, in effect, really huge headphones.

Like headphones, they are nice, though, for not bothering others when you are listening relatively loudly -- its kind of eerie having this one spot where the sound is so noticeably louder and clearer than only at a foot or two away. And sometimes the effect could be a little psychologically disturbing, it was like I was in my room, but then I wasn't really. Or maybe it was just the feeling of having all those surfaces pointing at me!

In the end, they ended up not being very practical, at least not for me. They require a lot of floor space (and look pretty big too) for something that focuses everything onto one little spot in the room. If I had a spare room, I'd keep them around, but I don't anticipate getting any surprise inheritances from unknown wealthy relatives, so spare large rooms aren't in my future... For practical listening, I've gone back to the older idea of tall dipole line arrays -- you still can get much of the benefit in avoiding (some) room effects, but still have it sound good over a relatively wide area of the room.

Focused arrays are like a lot of designs that declare one thing or other to be the one effect that is !NOT to be compromised! -- you end up with major compromises on all the other effects that you might not have thought wereimportant at all, but then find that those actually can't be ignored completely.

Good luck with your focused arrays, I hope you like them. When working right (and when I had a comfortable chair that positioned my head in the magic spot) they were maybe the most convincing speakers I had going. But certainly not the most relaxing.