A good friend of mine Don kindly donated me these old beauties.
Quad ESL-63 electrostatic speakers. Ive heard his and they sound incredible. Getting them serviced is a bit of an ordeal though. each speaker contains 4 electrostatic panels, each panel costs $200 to be serviced and that still requires that you install them yourself! We are going to have a shot at fixing our own. We need 8 to 12 micron thick mylar, a means to accurately tension and adhere it, An accurately applied conductive coating, then the rest is basic mechanical assembly and a little soldering.
here they go, not as imposing as some electrostatic speakers on the market.here you see the electrostatic panels assembled and soldered into place.
This shows a damaged panel, each side of the mylar is charged to 600 volts and can arc across doing localised damage. and the years also slowly take their tole.Notice the rings, they are charged with a small delay between each to simulate a point source for the treble, the bass panels just charge and thus move the whole panel.
Some people have rigs for stretching mylar with pulleys and known weights. which is fine, but i hope a pneumatic circuit can do it more elegantly, and give us a little more flexibility while we figure out the correct tension.Daisy chaining pneumatic cylinders with the same diameter tubing results in the last cylinder being under less pressure than the closest. we are awaiting more parts to finish this project up.
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