MartinLogan has come a long way in the 40-odd years it has been building loudspeakers, an undeniably long history that includes one enormous change in direction: when the company started making loudspeakers using conventional dynamic drivers.
You see, MartinLogan was created specifically to build loudspeakers that used electrostatic drivers to deliver the midrange and high frequencies — not the dynamic drivers that almost every other major speaker manufacturer was using at the time (with the notable exception of then-British Quad, already renowned for its ESLs).
MartinLogan’s first electrostatic prototype was shown prior to the company’s founding at the 1982 US Consumer Electronics Show, its reception convincing Gayle Martin Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland that they had a winner on their hands. They combined their middle names and returned to 1983’s CES with the production Martin-Logan Monolith. (Note the hyphen! The brand was hyphenated for many years, but it fell out at some point, the names now joined spacelessly.)
It wasn’t until 2010 that MartinLogan introduced its first ‘Motion’ range using what ML calls a ‘Folded Motion’ high-frequency driver. The F20 is the fourth generation of that original, and uses an upgraded high-frequency driver that MartinLogan calls a ‘Gen2 Obsidian Folded Motion Tweeter’. The differences include a larger magnet and an improved waveguide.
