I have ESL, will I hate Motion 12?

[SteveInNC]

I presently have a system (#99) based around Ascent i and Depth components. I'm about to close on a second-home condo in downtown, so I'm looking to equip it with some AV gear, mainly two-channel. I'll still have my single-family home with the original gear for the full-on home theater and "rock the house" listening experience. I'll eventually sell my house, then move to the condo full time in the interim while I build another house further out.

The new livingroom space is comparatively small, roughly 12wx12lx10h (feet), with hard surfaces everywhere, and the left "wall" is open to the dining and kitchen area, extending that dimension to about 26 feet. I'll be doing various forms of floor and wall treatments to deal with some of this, but the space itself is never going to be that good.

I'm considering Motion 12s as main speakers. I'm a long-time owner of ESS AMT 1C speakers, so I'm familiar with the whole Heil air transformer technology and sound. I probably won't have a sub in this setup regardless of whether I get Motions or panel speakers since I don't want to annoy the neighbors.

My main concern is that after having listened to ESLs for many years, will a more-or-less conventional speaker, even from ML, sound yucky? The only likely place to audition Motions around here is Best Buy/Magnolia, which will undoubtedly have crappy setup and electronics, so would be an unfair test of the speakers themselves.

The next option would be to move up a bit to the Source, but I don't particularly like their look. The Purity is better in that regard, but then I'm starting to push the limits on what I want to spend on a second system. While I've bought used electronics on Audigon before, I'm not so sure I'd want to do that with speakers unless they were in the immediate area where I could audition them and transport them myself.

Thoughts?

 

[Hocky]

I listened to the source and 12's back to back yesterday and they source is way better. You'll get a bit better bass extension from the 12s, but the detail, imaging and size of sound is no comparison.

 

[GaryG]

I bought a pair of ESS Heil AMT 1a's in 1972 (for $600). By the time they had gone to the 1c's in 1981 they had made some improvements. In 1972 I loved my Heil's. But they say you can never go back. Until yesterday I had Prodigy's as my mains. Today I have CLX's. I have listened to both the motion 12 and the source. I second Hocky's opinion.

 

[SteveInNC]

Thanks guys.

re: ESS, I bought mine in roughly 81-82, roughly $1100/pr, and they still work as bedroom speakers. The passive radiators are trashed, but you can still get them online, which I'll do at some point. I had a friend who had Transars, which at worst, looked impressive

I find it interesting that ML is effectively following in ESS' footsteps - ESS used to stand for Electro-Static Sound. They originally used stats for their tweeters before moving to the Heil.

 

[SteveInNC]

Follow-up to my own post:

I auditioned the above at a Magnolia today. I tend to agree with the assessment that the 12's have better bass, but the panels on the Source are still the "ML sound" that I prefer. As an aside, the sales guy at Magnolia behaved more like he was in a higher-end store - he made an extended effort to move the Sources into a listening room out of the main display room that they were in, involving unplugging alot of stuff and moving furniture around, then trying to find power in the wall in the listening room. He did have a tendency to want to crank the volume up though . They were powered off of a Pioneer Elite, which was OK for this set up.

The Sources don't sound as good as my Ascent i system, which is not surprising, particularly given that I use much better electronics than Magnolia has available and have better general acoustics in my room, but they do sound good enough for my intended purpose and at this price range.

I've seen the thread about the new ML series that roughly competes in the Source price range, but I have some concerns about a panel/Heil mixture for the group. If I read the PR blurb correctly, the mains will use panels and the center and surrounds will use AMT. Given that I have speakers with panels and have speakers with AMTs, I have some experience in the differences in the nature of their respective sounds. ML may have found a way to blend them seamlessly, but I'll have to hear it to believe it.

With a proposed ship date for ElectroMotion in March, I'll likely get the Sources now anyway.