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Loudspeaker designers are dreamers. Something takes hold of a man—the fact that loudspeaker designers are all men must be significant—and he wrestles with recalcitrant wood, arcane drive-units, and sundry coils, capacitors, and cables, to produce something which will be individual in its sound quality yet inherently more true to the original sound. An impossible task. Yet if there were to be an aristocratic subset of those dreamers, it would be those who have taken upon themselves the burden of producing electrostatic loudspeakers. For these farsighted engineers, there is no standing on the…
First impressions, gained with the CAL Tempest/Mod Squad Line Drive/Krell KSA-50 combination, were mixed. Imaging was stunningly precise, the speakers throwing a deep, if narrower than usual, soundstage. The mids and highs were clean but without the exaggerated feeling I had experienced with the original CLS. There was a threadbare quality to the lower midrange, however, that was quite disturbing. Nowhere in the instruction booklet or lavishly produced brochure does it say anything about breaking in the Sequels, but I did remember that the CLS required a good deal of playing-in time before…
Looking at the treble, by which I mean (with the exception of percussion instruments) the region occupied by the harmonics of instrumental and vocal sound, spanning from 3kHz to visible light!: I am sure the Sequel does roll off somewhere before the centimetric radar wavelengths, but up to the limit of my hearing (just over 16kHz in the mornings), the speaker pretty much did nothing to attract attention to itself. Maybe there was a hair too much on-axis air, but this certainly wasn't enough to bother me. Cymbals, which on lesser speakers acquire a "white," anonymous character instead of what…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-way, floor-standing loudspeaker with sealed-box bass and electrostatic midrange/tweeter unit. Drive-units: 48" by 10" curvilinear electrostatic panel, 10" plastic-cone woofer. Crossover frequency: 250Hz. Crossover slopes: second-order, 12dB/octave. Frequency response: 28Hz–2kHz –2dB. Bass control switch: shelves response between 28Hz and 250Hz down by 3dB. Dispersion: 30° horizontal (no frequency limits), 48" line source vertical. Sensitivity: 89dB/2.83V/m. Nominal impedance: 6 ohms, with a minimum of 2 ohms. Impedance phase angle: less than 45…
Sidebar 2: JA's System
The preamplifier initially used for CD and open-reel tape replay was the Mod Squad Line Drive Deluxe AGT. As my usual Vendetta Research SCP2 phono preamp was away for updating to SCP2A status, I made use of the sample of the Conrad-Johnson Premier Seven tube preamplifier reviewed by J. Gordon Holt last November to play "real" records. Source components consisted of a 1975-vintage Revox A77 to play my own and others' 15ips master tapes, a Linn Sondek/Ekos/Troika setup sitting on a Sound Organisation table to play LPs, and the CAL Tempest SE two-box CD player. For…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Electrostatic loudspeakers have gained a reputation for being hard to drive, so it was with my bump of curiosity piqued that I measured the load represented by the Sequel II. Fig.1 shows the result. A well-damped peak at 33Hz reveals the woofer tuning, while the overall graph suggests a rating of 4 ohms rather than 6. The speaker drops to 3 ohms at 440Hz and to a hair over 2 at 24kHz, from which I infer that puny amplifiers, current-wise, should best be avoided. (Music has considerable energy at 440Hz, though only the occasional high-level cymbal crash will cause…
Sam Tellig wrote about the Sequel II in September 1989 (Vol.12 No.9):
Act I, Scene One
"Finished version, I promise."
Gayle Sanders was reassuring the press about the $35k Statement at last summer's CES.
MartinLogan seems to run through revisions rather rapidly. For instance, no sooner had I settled in with the Sequel (which itself had undergone some major changes since first being introduced) than M/L announced the Sequel II. Drat! All those listening notes for naught.
Not quite. The original Sequels and the new Sequel IIs have much in common—sound as well…
Dick Olsher reviewed the Sequel II loudspeaker in October 1989 (Vol.12 No.10):
It was in early August, on a Sunday afternoon, that I got my first listen to the MartinLogan Sequels. Remarkable transparency, lightening-quick transients, and lots of low-level detail, were some of my immediate observations. You should know that the venue was JA's listening room, and the occasion was the Stereophile writers confab, where we compiled the "Recommended Components" listing that appears in this issue. There was a significant slice of the magazine's writers on hand, including guru J. Gordon Holt (…
In the 1970s, a small black-and-white ad sometimes ran in the pages of Playboy magazine. The ad pictured an attractive young woman with lots of disheveled hair and a crooked grin. There was little else to the ad other than the headline, which the reader would assume was being spoken by the model: "It takes more than Martinis to build an image, Mister!"
We were supposed to feel that we had just been given a friendly word of advice by exactly the sort of young woman we spent our days and nights trying to impress. "Martinis," of course, was an allusion to the James Bond novels and…
THE DOWLAND PROJECT: Romaria
The Dowland Project: John Potter, tenor; John Surman, tenor & bass recorder. soprano saxophone, bass clarinet; Milos Valent, violin, viola; John Stubbs, baroque guitar, vihuela
ECM New Series 1970 (CD). 2008. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Markus Heiland, eng. DDD. TT: 77:00
Performance ***½
Sonics ****
The Dowland Project: John Potter, tenor; John Surman, tenor & bass recorder. soprano saxophone, bass clarinet; Milos Valent, violin, viola; John Stubbs, baroque guitar, vihuela
ECM New Series 1970 (CD). 2008. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Markus Heiland, eng. DDD. TT: 77:00
Performance ***½
Sonics ****
Depending on how you date it, the "authentic instrument" movement is at least 30 years old. Throughout its history, there has been a certain amount of understandable backlash; from performers who insist on the evolved superiority of modern…