Chevelle
- Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Get off the floor and on the wall with the EFX electrostatic on-wall speaker. This versatile on-wall electrostat is the perfect surround speaker for any MartinLogan home theater system.
MartinLogan is proud to introduce the slim, on-wall EFX™ hybrid electrostatic loudspeaker, featuring XStat™ technology, dramatically reducing cabinet size, yet establishing new standards for efficiency, dynamics and precision.
Housed within a radical, ultra-ridged extruded aluminum AirFrame™, the EFX's new CLS XStat transducer builds upon the legacy of MartinLogan's electrostatic heritage with the incorporation of advanced vacuum bonding and MicroPerf stat panels, providing even greater efficiency and precision.
If you won't settle for anything but electrostats next to your new flatscreen TV, the EFX is the perfect solution at just 6.5-inches deep. Free up precious floorspace by mounting EFX to your wall with the included wall brackets. The EFX is also the ultimate high-performance home theater surround speaker and complements MartinLogan's entire line of electrostatic loudspeakers. EFX rotates with the pivoting wall bracket to easily focus your surround sound experience.
Proprietary Vojtko filtering technology is utilized for EFX's electrostatic transducer. This audiophile quality network, derived from the CLX, is carefully hand-built using precision point-to-point wiring, polypropylene capacitors, massive air-core coils, and a custom wound E-I core transformer—flawlessly preserving micro-acoustic subtleties while effortlessly handling the broadest range of dynamics contained within even the most demanding sonic source.
MartinLogan's proprietary tool-less binding posts simplify cable connection and management. EFX features custom 5-way binding posts and provide the ultimate level of flexibility for connection and setup. To further simplify setup and cable management, the EFX features a low-voltage DC power supply eliminates the need for a traditional, heavy IEC power cord.
The stat panel is relatively small, but it still sounds excellent. The frequency response is especially excellent from about 3kHz all the way to 22kHz, with useable response extending well past my measurement setup's threshold of 24kHz. I also have not measured or been able to audibly hear any issues from having this dipole speaker mounted so close to the wall. That makes this an especially excellent surround channel speaker. It will reproduce ambient noises you otherwise wouldn't hear with most box speakers; it takes a decent Beryllium tweeter or the world's greatest soft dome, aluminum or titanium tweeter to keep up with these on the top end. The 6.5" woofer isn't as good as it could be, and it could benefit from a higher order low-pass crossover. It would be much better if it had the aluminum cone, high excursion 6.5" woofer from the Focus C18, and a redesigned the crossover to avoid the midrange from the woofer overpowering the midrange from the stat panel. That said, even though it's not ideal, room correction like ARC Genesis or Dirac Live can easily fix the midrange response issues. That conclusion leads me to the bottom line that these speakers are fairly overpriced for the performance they provide. They should not be more expensive than the ESL, which has a much larger stat panel, cabinet and woofer. I'm looking to have an entirely hybrid-electrostat 5.1 system in a very small room, so I don't have much of a choice but to use these for the surround channels. It's going to be a chore to deal with modifying the crossover, but I will definitely be experimenting with different 6.5" woofers in this speaker.