Planar Speaker Asylum

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Original Message

Maggies Love Linaeum

Posted by Hoshi on November 1, 2009 at 09:41:13:

I donâ€™t post much here but do a ton of reading and have picked up a ton on valuable information here on the Asylum. I wanted to share my excitement on something that has been discussed here in the past but I donâ€™t believe anyone has done this mod to their Gunned Maggie or posted pictures so here it goes.

Iâ€™ve owned and loved my DIY Gunned SMGaâ€™s for the last eight months. Iâ€™ve listened to more music during that time frame than any other period of my life. My modified SMGaâ€™s are not perfect but they play music that allows me to listen for hours at a time. They are very musical speakers but the one area they lack would be top end extension. Just to clarify, the one thing I cannot tolerate is a speaker that is fatiguing and hard to listen to over time. If I had to choose, Iâ€™d rather have a polite presentation over one that it a little hot. Because of this, Iâ€™ve often thought about modifying a pair of MG IIIâ€™s or a pair of 2.6â€™s with a ribbon tweeter until I stumbled onto a Magnepan dealer in the San Francisco Bay area.

I was traveling on business a few months back and entered this stereo shop. Playing in the front room was a pair of MG 1.6â€™s with a Linaeum tweeter mounted on the top of the panel. It was playing Eric Claptonâ€™s â€œUnpluggedâ€. I was blown away with the soundstage depth and high end detail. I sat down and listed to a couple more tracks on the CD and the dealer encouraged me to play anything from his collection of music. I spent the next hour just listening to familiar songs mentally comparing what I was hearing to how my speakers sounded. The dealer was extremely friendly and continued to chat with me even though I told him that I was out of town and just killing time.

Over the next few days, I spend time in the archives here on the Asylum, and found posts noting this shop and modification as it has been briefly discussed in the past. I believe what makes this tweeter so special with Magnepans is because it is bi-directional as Maggies are. The Linaeum tweeter is very unique in appearance and is no longer being manufactured to my knowledge. They are however available on eBay. I found a NOS pair and won the auction for $67.00.

I mounted them directly over the tweeter section of my SMGaâ€™s. I made a gasket that went under the tweeters from some left over sound deadening material that I used to make a projector hush box. It is very dense stuff and helps tame vibration. I used what I believe to be a first order cross over running the tweeter in parallel with the crossover for the SMGaâ€™s. I used a 2.0uf Obligatto Film Oil as the crossover for the Linaeum. I experimented with values for 1.0uf to 2.56uf and found the 2.0uf to be the sweet spot. I ended up reversing polarity on the tweeters. I also tried a bybass cap with the Linaeum but did not care of them. The SMGâ€™a crossover is the PG recipe which consists of (2) 22uf Obligatto old film caps, (1) 6uf Dynamicap and a .78mh Alpha Core inductor. I also added a .01uf Vishay MPK 1837 bypass cap in parallel with the Obligattoâ€™s and Dynamicap.

After about 50 hours of run-in, Iâ€™ve been enjoying my SMGâ€™s/Linaeumâ€™s for a couple of months now so the honeymoon phase is over and I still love this set up. It took many hours of trial and error but it was fun and well worth it. Iâ€™m running the SMGaâ€™s and tweeters without fuses and can play my music wide open with no ill effects. The Linaeumâ€™s seem fairly robust and can handle more than the advertised power handling capacity. Iâ€™m running 500wpc into 4 ohms. Also incorporated is a REL Sub.

The end result is what I had hoped for. My speakers still have the Maggie magic but I now have a larger sound stage and have a top end that sounds smoother and bigger than that of the true ribbons. Just for kicks, I disconnect the Linaeumâ€™s the other day and I could not believe the amount of top end information that I was missing. My speakers almost sounded as if something was broken. The next upgrade; designing a frame that will blend the physical appearance of the tweeters in a more visually appealing manner with the rest of the speaker.