OK, let's play that game.
Fact: MartinLogan just shut down production of their ESL speakers at the facility they have been produced at for thirty years and is moving that production to another country.
Ok, that's true, but they are moving it to a plant that has a lot of highly skilled workers in the audio industry, not just some factory in China like Quad, B&W and others have done.
Fact: MartinLogan fired most of the production staff that have been making these speakers for the last several decades.
We really aren't sure about this. We don't know who's all going, staying, or taking early retirement.
Fact: MartinLogan is moving production of these speakers to a manufacturing facility that has heretofore specialized in manufacturing traditional box speakers with cone drivers.
This is true for the most part, but we don't know what the level of expertise on the new people might be making the actual electrostatic panel, which is really the only difference here. Cabinets and crossovers are pretty much cabinets and crossovers. So, we've condemned the Paradigm staff to failure before seeing what they've come up with. How do know beyond any doubt that they can't build a better speaker than before? And how do you know that's not part of what's behind this?
Fact: MartinLogan instituted a marketing campaign boasting that their speakers were "made in the heartland" just a few months before shifting production to another country.
I agree this was a very bad move, and knowing the past track record of ML, would lend me to think no one in Kansas saw this coming...
Fact: The current CEO of MartinLogan is based in Canada, has been on the job less than a year, is in charge of both MartinLogan and Paradigm, and has absolutely no prior work experience in the audio industry. His last job was at a company manufacturing chimney vents and his claim to fame there was consolidation of operations and cost cutting.
This is also potentially very bad, but again, this person may not last at the helm.
Fact: MartinLogan just fired Jim Power, who is revered among ML enthusiasts for his renowned customer service.
Again, we don't know the subtleties of this situation 100%.
Fact: MartinLogan has recently made clear that they do not intend to continue to support all older models indefinitely. This is something that has never before been suggested by this company, which has built a name for itself for its dedication to customer service.
Dedication to customer service and not supporting 25 year old models are separate and not mutually exclusive concepts. Again, no one has mentioned which models will and will not be supported, so it's tough to freak out about this at this point. I just bought a pair of CLS's, so I'm hoping I'm not in this boat.
Fact: Over the last five years, Martin Logan has come out with one single innovative speaker that pushes the current state of the art in electrostatic speaker design, the CLX. This speaker was in R&D for at least two to three years before it was released in 2008. It is quite likely that development of this speaker began even before current management took over ML in October of 2005.
When I interviewed David Allen in the fall of 2008, he said that the CLX was totally designed by the current staff and that it went from concept to market in 19 months. The Summit was the last ML product that Gayle had his hands on at ML.
Fact: The crossover technology from the CLX was applied to the Summit to create the Summit X and they took one woofer out of that to create the Spire. Other than that crossover technology and some esthetics, the Summit X and Spire are just not much different from the Summit and Vantage from five years ago. So really, the CLX is the only innovation at the high end from this company in five years.
Let's take this a step further. Other than the flat panel woofer, MartinLogan really hasn't had any major technology innovations other than the curved panel... Electrostatic speaker technology has been around for about 60 years. But while we are on that subject, what has Sound Labs, Quad, or any of the other electrostatic speaker companies really come up with in terms of "innovation"? I think most of MartinLogan's innovations have come in the way of refining an existing product and truly making an electrostatic speaker that has been able to be produced in quantity that is very durable. None of the other electrostat makers have ever been able to do that at the level that ML has.
You talk about buying a pair of Maggies or Sound Labs... Where's the innovation there? The Magnepan has incorporated a ribbon tweeter and midrange to their original 45 year old design about 25 years ago. The new 1.7 has scaled up the "quasi ribbon" driver to the size of a woofer this year.
Same with Sound Labs. They make an excellent product, but it's all been refinement, not revolution, so this is a pretty weak argument. For that matter, how much real ground breaking technology has there been in the speaker world period over the last 30 years? A lot of it has just been applying advanced materials to existing processes. (i.e. ceramic and diamond tweeters, teflon capacitors, better inductors, more rigid cabinet materials.
Fact: Over the last five years, Martin Logan has introduced almost a dozen different speaker models costing less than $1500 a pair which do not utilize MartinLogan's ESL driver, not to mention several inexpensive center channels and three subwoofers that retail for under a grand. All of these new models are intended for the home theater market and are a far cry from the high end of audio.
And they also introduced the CLX, which would probably not have been possible without the cash flow from the entry level product. So, again, I don't see this as relevant. If ML started slacking off on their top products or dropped the upper end of the line because of this, I could see the issue.
Ok, those are just a few of the relevant facts that I could think of off the top of my head. Tell me, timm, looking at your list of facts and mine, and making reasonable inferences from those facts, whose point of view is best supported by the facts? I really don't think I am jumping to conclusions. And I don't need a weather man to tell me which way the wind is blowing.
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