Audiophilepure

MartinLogan Renaissance ESL 15A Electrostatic Loudspeaker Review

The performance of the ESL 15A’s has been nothing short of phenomenal. Every genre of music has been well served by these wonderful towers. They can rock Pink Floyd and the band’s larger-than-life sonics with ease. Then they can bring a female vocalist into one’s living room. Large-scale orchestra? They don’t even break a sweat. There wasn’t a single music sample thrown at these transducers that wasn’t handled with close to perfection.

This next part is the most subjective, least scientific look at these speakers in this review. In business travels, I will often frequent high-end audio stores just to get a feel for ‘what’s out there.’ As mentioned earlier, one pair of speakers reminded me a lot of the experience with the MartinLogans. This was discovered during a demo session with the Wilson Audio Alexx V speakers being driven by a pair of McIntosh Labs MC1.25KW mono amplifiers. The listening room was about twice the size of the one in my home. The big Wilsons had this huge presence that brought goosebumps. At $164,000 per pair, they blew me away with how well they brought everything to life.

The ESL 15A’s, in our listening room, elicited a similar response. They feel like a speaker with no realistic limits in our room. They did so with a $29,000 price tag and with an amplifier that retails for $14,000 vs. the $31,000 amp pair that was driving the Wilsons. Does this mean the $29,000 MartinLogans are a match for the $164,000 Wilsons? That would require a rigorous series of blind listening tests in the same room to find out if that is true.