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In Reply to: RE: Maggie madness posted by JBen on March 22, 2012 at 12:26:05
Haven't listened to 3.7s yet, but after auditioning 1.7s, I didn't feel even the slightest urge to replace my MG-I IMPs.
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It is a rare dealer who can properly setup and demo maggies. It is an even rarer dealer who wants to SELL you maggies.
Said another way I had the same reaction to the 3.6s I heard at a dealers shop. It sounded worse than my mmgs!
But no one sane thinks the mmgs are better than the 3.6s.
Now I am assuming that you demoed them in a dealers showroom, but I bet I am right on that, right?
Afterwards we discovered faith; it's all you need
took my brothers on a 45 min drive once to hear 3.6's only to spend the return trip apologizing on how bad they sounded.. dealers will set them up improperly and blame it on Magnepans inability to deliver bass, then try to sell you one of their subwoofers; not realizing when properly setup and driven, no subs are required (well for most folks anyway).
may the bridges I burn light the way....
Gotta have the sub - I love that 20hz feeling in my buttocks.
That didn't come out right...
but yeah; understood
may the bridges I burn light the way....
.
Now I am assuming that you demoed them in a dealers showroom, but I bet I am right on that, right?
That was a safe bet, Dawn:) I only listened to them at dealer's, who was driving them using McIntosh gear. Maybe it was the room, maybe it was the upstream mismatch, but they sounded underwhelming, to put it very mildly.
This seems to be the case with some dealers. Yet, the one over here is good. Some people around here don't like that one has to make an appointment. I kind of got put off by it also at first, years ago.
However, they prepare for you. Even if they can't make an ideal setting available, theirs is good enough to begin with. By the time you arrive, the gear is warmed up, things are in place and they give you time to tweak a little. If they tried to do this with every walk-in, the Maggies would never get a fair audition.
That said, the first audition of 3.6s there, a while ago, did have me loving my MMGs more for a while during the session. The only more charming thing was the ribbon tweeter. Then they allowed me to tweak the room a little and things began to fall in place. I could see the promise.
Now, for the 1.7s and 3.7s I asked for schedules when I could spend more quality time with each as they matured (several visits). The 3.7s never felt too green and by the last time I last heard them I was salivating for them.
OTOH, the 1.7s took their time but they eventually showed their great charms. If I had not been so lucky improving my MMG's tweeter, the 1.7 would have been a natural step-up. The 3.7s will have to be it for me, however.
What is it with dealers? They must know that Maggies are more critical to setup than the other boxes they sell, yet they just stick them anywhere. I was helping my son look for HT speakers so we visited the two somewhat close-by high end audio hangouts. He needs a more traditional 5 box setup due to placement limitations, but he has heard my Maggies many times and knows how they are supposed to sound.The store that sells Maggies has the 3.7s in sort of an open hallway aiming across the width with no side walls. They have the 1.7s in a rectangular room but those are not placed well either in my opinion. In both cases they are running Moon integrated amps with low end music servers, which (sorry to Moon fans) sound thin, likely due more to the setup than anything else. My son asked "Why do the 3.7s sound like crap? Your setup is really sweet". I fully agreed on both counts.
To address the OP's topic, we also heard Focal Stella Utopia IIIs ($90K) and some Wilson Sophias ($18k) that day. Not tempted. The Focals just sounded huge but with a wierd soundstage. The Wilsons actually sounded better than the monster Focals IMHO, but not better than Maggies, and I'll bet the 20.7s would seal that argument if set up correctly. I also have applied serious money in supporting equipment to bring out the best of my Maggies. They do exploit quality electronics as well as any and more than most.
Edits: 03/23/12
Second the odd soundstage on the Focal.
At the dealer's they were setup in an acoustical disaster room with insane treatments and the Utopia's mtm portion's lobes were not aimed correctly. I had to go on my knees behind the listening seat to find the correctly reinforced lobe.
At my friend's the well engineered acoustics and did provide very good tonal performance for the Utopias but the soundstage was a weirdly deep box between the speakers. Detail retrieval was very good, not far from a planar. BTW it was powered by a big Moon integrated, which was very good. It does not sound lean or thin at all - now heard on 4 or 5 different speaker systems (nova Utopia, Cremona M, Joseph Pearls, Revel Studios, focal MTMs).
Comparing these Utopias and other speakers from Magico, B&W, Sonus Faber, Revel etc, to a plain jane stock maggie - 3.6 or 1.6, there is a very obvious superiority in midrange detail against both, but it is not night and day, and a superiority in treble against the QR tweeters. The bass is not as tight on the box speakers, but there is way more of it, it has more impact, and extends lower.
There is more to be had from maggies via mods. with the ribbon tweeter powered directly by a class A amp with a cap and resistor line level filter, there is nothing at all superior to it among the best box speakers. However, even with direct drive via multiamping, the midrange is not as transparent with the wire mid maggies. That said, none of these top end box speakers have the kind of soundstage and image presentation that the maggies produce. Imaging may be more stable and less ethereal, but there is a smaller scale and less natural feel to them. With bracing multiamping and sufficient power, the maggies have decent bass, superior in tightness, competitive in medium volume dynamics, but not in uncompressed loudness and definitely not in extension.
However, Tympani bass panels when braced and supplied with ample power can do far better in the bass than the 1.6 and 3.6, that are just too small to do it. They are competitive in uncompressed mid bass down to 40 hz with most of the top end box speakers. They only lack in the bottom octave against the biggest of the box speakers, but don't think your little Bryston 4B.x will do the job, nor would anything less than 1 kw at 4 ohms with stability at high current draws. You also need to have the XO active at line level. I have mimicked the Utopia's tonal balance successfully down to 30 hz, below that I don't get the substantial power tha the Utopias can output. But it is not by that much.
I would presume that the thinner midrange QR drivers in the 20.7 will give the kind of detail that is just not quite there on the other maggies' midrange. In the case of the Tympani models, the midrange was downright thick in high end terms. I replaced mine with a BG Neo8 line array. This is easily as good or better than all of the box speakers I have ever heard under any circumstances anywhere.
I kept looking for speakers that can give me a direction as to where to aim in further tweaking my speakers. The only thing that I have found was the unreal bass heavy balance of the Utopia line, which I actually liked better than the more neutral balance I had aimed for before. It is terrifically disapointing that there is nowhere to go from here without taking a second mortgage or pimping my neices and probably nephews too for the likes of an MBl 101.
Great post.
I understand your frustration that there's no where to go. You could aim for an improved ribbon, maybe buy a pair of 3.3's and use those? 20.1's still being too expensive. Other than that, all I can think of is trying an electrostatic midrange (I know you don't want a ribbon because of the torsion problem), getting more Tympanis and adding bass panels, or going with tri-center, surround, or DEQX (though I also know you don't want to go digital). (You could also add a line of plasma tweeters, at $7000 a pop . . . )
Since you mentioned a plasma tweeter....Plasmasonic - audio modulated Tesla Coil
Nikola Tesla would have approved, I think. Although it is likely more of a novelty than a serious, high performance tweeter. That said... it is still pretty cool.
Edits: 03/24/12 03/24/12
That's great. Now, if we can only make a line source version (how about a 6' arc?).
Isn't it though? A rather cool light show to go with the music. An old idea but a goody.A friend that I worked with built his own Tesla coil and was way proud of it. He went to see Duke University's Tesla coil for inspiration. After seeing what they had he told me that he was " I was not impressed. They call that a Tesla coil?" His neighbors complain about reception problems when he runs it of an everning. They're kind of afraid of him so no one complains much. He's a bit of an odd bird but harmless. I think it's the camoflaged paint ball outfit he uses to go play on weekends. He looks a little terminator like and is about 6'4" and 220 lbs. If they were casting for the next Texas Chainsaw Masacre he looks the part of an unstable serial killer too. And if they knew that he was studying for the priesthood they might be a little less intimidated. I kept this to myself as I found it to be pretty funny.
Hmmm... a set of Plasmatronic speakers or build a set of Linwitz Labs Pluto's? I'm going to have to go with the Pluto's because a couple of the videos shows that some nasty sparks arc out from the plasma stream every so often. That would pretty much ruin the mood if you have to keep putting out the carpet. And I cannot imagine a worse RF inviroment. It would take a lot more than chokes to suppress that. Still, the cool factor cannot be denied.
Edits: 03/25/12 03/25/12 03/25/12
I think Mmlrot1 has a pair of Plasmatronics, paired with Apogees in the bass. Also read somewhere that Prof. Hill says he could build a full-range plasma if he had the funding.
When I was in school, they had a two-story-tall Van de Graaff generator next to the physics building. I always thought that would be a good way to take revenge on an excessively electrostatic cat. Come to think of it, what about a cat speaker? You could charge its fur with a rotating glass rod, and use stators located on either side to play it. And you'd get the occasional meow for color.
Cats are notoriously hard to dampen well. You'd either need to spend a fortune's worth of time developing a well-made sealed box or live with the residual noise. Not worth the time for the results, but could be one of those things just to say you did it.
On the other hand, if you try to dampen them, their SPL goes through the roof!
What is it with dealers? They must know that Maggies are more critical to setup than the other boxes they sell, yet they just stick them anywhere.
Maybe it's Maggies relatively low price tag? I've noticed that dealers have a tendency to look down on the economy class gear. I remember a few years back when I asked my local dealer about the Oppo player, he went all snobbish on me. He said that just the power cable on his other players costs way more than the Oppo player. Yeah, so what?
They don't seem keen on working their tails off to make a sale, unless there is a promise of a huge commission at the end of the rainbow. And I'm not sure how hefty would a commission on Maggies be, considering all the requisite hard work needed to set them properly. On the other hand, a commission on a $90K pair of speakers must be worth salivating over.
Suspect you're right about that.
I see that Stereophile gave the Oppo a Class A rating, BTW. Good for them!
Yep, that was a gutsy move.
Thank GOD for Maggies, be it the MMG's, 12's, 1.7's, 3.7's etc. Over the years I've been blessed by having some wonderful "cone" speakers, my favorites being "Merlin". However, my favorite all time speaker was my old 3.6's (currently, I have the MMG's which fit & work wonderfully in my small 850 sq. ft. condo/apartment, and I'm loving them)
I've not heard many speakers costing more than $10K, therefore I cant comment or make any comparisons. The bottom line for me, is that Maggies have been the best overall speaker I've owned, with the added bonus of being cheap. Thank you Magneplanar for having the model line-up you have, which address's "most" everyone's budget and space
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