MartinLogan Theos

When MartinLogan recently visited to show off a pair of their Theos electrostatic floor-standing speakers, they lit up our cavernous, notoriously speaker-unfriendly product training room with sound that simply blew us away. And they did it using a moderately priced receiver that never even broke a sweat! Rock, Jazz, and acoustic music unfolded from the Theos' tall, sleek panels with a sense of immediacy and presence that felt as if the musicians were sitting there in the room. Our takeaway: you don't need a rack full of uber-expensive components or a fancy, dedicated listening room to enjoy fantastic sound with these speakers. Unlike speakers that use domes and cones to reproduce treble and midrange, the Theos features an ultra-thin polymer film, or diaphragm, suspended between two electrically charged, perforated steel plates. The diaphragm's ultra-low mass allows it to move very efficiently back and forth between the plates thousands of times a second in response to the music signal, creating enticingly ...