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(Bruce J. Richman) said:

Thanks for the useful information, Sander. I'm not making any hasty decisions
when it comes to amplifier swapping, even though at 70 watts/channel, the CJ
falls below what ML officially recommends for most of their speakers (80 to 200
watts). However, I know that the CJ is also quite stable, has fairly massive
transformers, and, when I first got the speakers several years ago, did not
seem to have any trouble in driving the speakers to very acceptable volume
levels.

Forget about the "watts" thing.
100 watts is twice as loud as 10 watts, which is in turn twice as loud
as 1 watt.
Switching from a 70 watts amp to a 140 watts type won't gain you much.
The main difference may lie in the fact that the 140 watts type has a
beefier power supply, meaning it is able to deliver more current ( and
voltage BTW) in certain frequency areas where your speakers have dips.

My hybrid amps ( there they are again) put out 20 Veff at 8 ohms,
which could be roughly translated to 50 watts.
However, due to a massive power supply and several other designing
featues, it doubles up to 100 watts in 4 ohms, close to 200 watts in 2
ohms and 320 watts in 1 ohm. ( yep, the last figure should read 400,
but there's a limit to everything, in this case the internal "on"
resistance of the power MOSFETs. Besides, my dummy load resistors
started to smoke :-)
It plays subjectively louder than an Onkyo M5099 that was in for
repair which I finally got working right, and compared against my
humble contraption.
This Onkyo 40 kg beast is specced as at least 200 watts in 8 ohms.
Go figure!

One of the signs of a good amp IMHO is that you can turn up the volume
without any compression or distortion effects, and it still doesn't
sound "loud" subjectively.
The loudness isn't discovered until one wants to say something and has
to raise his voice immensely :-)

I'm going to talk directly to the folks at ML in the near future before I make
any decisions. I'm also considering switching to Quads, in which case the CJ
would probably be an ideal match.

That would be a wise decision. Many here would agree I think.

And of course, I'm aware of the fact that if/when I add a subwoofer to either
in the future, the demands on the electrostatics become less.

Don't forget that dynamics also decrease when the panels get worse.
In general, the overall performance is not at the level it could be.

--
Sander deWaal
"SOA of a KT88? Sufficient."