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If it's making great music you don't need to jump onto the upgrade hamster wheel :-)

Hi Mia, Good to see a woman in the hobby. I've known one or two in my life, not many. I agree with searching the used market. People love to upgrade, and can leave behind some spectacularly great used equipment. I got a used pair of Parasound JC-1's on auction from USA Audio Mart. I don't...

I don't recommend buying a stereo solid state amp with the intent of converting it to a momoblock down the road. Hollow state is fine. You just strap the output transformer secondaries in parallel, giving you half the original output impedance. If the MC152 is one of Mac's solid state amps...

Good to know for when my Descent i bites the dust.

Your link is to the CLSIIz, which did have verticals. The original CLs didn't.

The size and shape of each section determines the drum resonance. They are staggered, which shapes the overall frequency response. There is usually a compensating network inside the electronics which further shapes the response. Also, the dimensions of each section are constrained by...

I've heard this to be true. With no charge, the panel looks like a pure capacitor to the driving circuitry. What damage may occur depends on that driving circuitry, but it's definitely not a good idea, so I've never tried it for more than a few seconds.

When the triac is turned on, it shorts R3 to ground, making R1-R3 a voltage divider, and reducing the voltage feeding the multiplier stack. When it's turned off, there is no voltage division happening. With no triac there, it's as if the triac is turned off. So you're getting full voltage all...

Is there any reason for not listening at high levels, for serious listening? You may just be dealing with the Fletcher-Munson effect. A narrow sweet spot is definitely a speaker placement issue, assuming both panels are radiating normally over their entire area (which you can check with a...

I wouldn't put op amps and cables in exactly the same category. Op amps have at least the capability of being driven into nonlinearity whereas cables don't. The audiophile wisdom that op amps have no place in audiophile equipment comes from the days when the only available OA's had terrible...

I completely concur, and from experience (and WAF did play a role in trying that sort of placement in the first place). With any speaker it's a bad idea, but with the coherence of the waves launched from an ESL it's a disaster for imaging. Near reflections from behind are very confusing.

You seem to have plenty of space to work with, fighting with a small room is not your issue. People here can only be of limited help regardless of well known rules of thumb (for example, first I would try to get the speakers as far away from the wall behind them as possible. 20" is far from...

It does sound like you need new panels. How much of a fortune it will cost, you'll just have to find out from ML. Careful you don't blow something up driving them hard to compensate for loss of efficiency. I don't know exactly how humid it gets in Tuscany, but here in Albany, NY the humidity...

You're lucky the bent panel worked, and that you were able to mostly unbend it. The CLS II panel I fell on top of did not work, even after attempting to unbend it. Perhaps because it uses a higher voltage than the EM. It just continually arced no matter what I did. One replacement panel and...

A guy I used to work with in the engineering department of a public broadcasting facility used to appraise situations thus: "There are only two possibilities, either it's the supply or the load". That well sums up ESL problems. If it's the power supply--a pretty common failure point for an...

Quick quibble: I don't believe the Monoliths were full range ESL's. That is not to say they're not a challenging load. I agree entirely about amps. Audio/video receivers are sub-optimal for ESL's. There are a number of audiophile quality integrated amps out there now but to be serious, IMO...

I never had any port noise complaints myself :-)

With hollow state electronics, a high quality OT is critical. Without that, driving a difficult load such as an ESL, all the voltage and current won't help. You need a transformer that not only reflects a low effective impedance to the speaker but has low enough phase shift so that negative...

80 cm is quite a bit closer to the wall behind the speaker (I have trouble with "front wall") than is usually recommended. It just goes to show that no formula is going to tell you how to place your speakers in your room.. Your mileage may vary, by quite a bit. Every room is different. You...

You could do worse than to get yourself a thread gauge. I have a couple like this...