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Hot Potato

"Dissing" Magnepan on here is akin to the problems I encounter reviewing music in the indie world. The majors have so beaten it down that everyone feels every review should be a good one, or nobdy will buy it, etc... so it is very taboo.

My feeling is, if you tell them shit is shinola they sure as hell won't buy shinola again. I LOVE maggies, they are the only speakers I have ever loved, but they have problems, and so does the company.

In that vein, I think magnepan, or perhaps more pointedly Mr. Winey, reminds me a lot of the Wright Brothers. They both did some groundwork and suddenly found they invented something nobody else ever had. And the first thing both of them did was run to the patent office and secure every step so nobody else could ever make one.

It's theirs, they made it, period. You try to make one, see you in court.

Both of them also seemed to suffer from the belief that both were nearly perfect to begin with. Once the Wrights info got out, people like Glenn Curtiss were making planes that could fly rings around the Wrights, who were too busy suing everyone. It's very telling that we invented the airplane, yet in WWI we were the only country that could not make it's own front line fighter plane. We had none, because of the Wrights.

I think if magnepan had leased it's patents to say 3-5 other companies back in 1990, you would see planer designs that would boggle the mind and ears by now. But they didn't, and they won't, even though the royalties would more than make up for any lost sales. It's the Wright mentality, best illustrated in an old cartoon from the time with Orville looking up at a plane and shouting "Get out of my sky!".

They only make miniscule changes every 10 years, they don't correct flawed processes (I am sure someone could design a machine that could hot wrap the coils between 2 sheets of ultra thin mylar which would resolve this problem forever, and it would not kill them to build with better caps and coils upon request) and while their customer service is good, they don't even have a presence on a board like this.

And what can you do? They have a monopoly, the old their way or the highway. I would like to see them embrace their speakers with the passion we all do, but they don't, and I don't see that changing.


It's all about the music...

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