Colin loved reading your experience with Mags.
What you said about the MG 111 model really resonated with me.
I was at a HIFI show in Brighton in 1984 or 5 and in the Absolute Sounds room they had a Oracle Turntable with an Air Tangent arm and Koetsu Onyx cartridge maybe Audio Research SP 10 and Krell monoblocks and MG 111.
I so vividly remember hearing this cymbal on the music they where playing and it just sounded like a cymbal.Metallic sounding rather than a box speaker doing a tissy sounding cymbal.( well all the speakers I had heard up to then Linn Isobariks etc.) That room blew me away.
Many years later at the Windsor Hi FI News show in 2018 I heard some Mag 20.7 with Trilogy amps and Mike Valentine from Chasing The Dragon playing his recordings the sound from that room was incredible.It blew the Absolute Sounds room away at a 3rd of the cost.
Left thinking I have got to get some Mags and did the following year getting some white 1.7 i's
Whats your thoughts on fuse mods ? My mate with 1.7 i has removed his and also changed the speaker terminals and jumper.
I am not electronically savvy like him but might let him mod mine.
Just changed mine to tweeters on the outside and have to say on classical that I have been playing they sound really lovely.I might revert back but for the next couple of weeks will keep them as they are.
There is a thread here about I need fast sounding speakers and as usual their all box recommendations.
Mags are the fastest speakers I have heard their transient speed is incredible.That's why they sound so alive and music in the room.
What I love about mine is they never ever get fatiguing to listen too.Just so natural and you just get drawn in.
3.7's is a thought but just enjoying my 1.7's so much and it's a big money outlay so just loving buying more and more music on vinyl and CD.
Yes, any Magnepan is faster than a box speaker with conventional cone, as the driver is lighter and there is also no box to add overhang etc.
The Magnepan true ribbon tweeter is faster still than the normal Magnepan drivers. The ribbon tweeter is just a very thin piece of aluminium, thinner than a human hair, with magnets on the sides of the cage to excite it. If you blow very lightly on the ribbon then it moves! It provides the best detail, fastest transients and best extension from a tweeter. The old Apogee tweeter was a bit similar but the Magnepan design is different. It’s thinner and has many damping points spaced over a few inches throughout the whole tweeter, which improves the performance and damps resonances. The Apogee tweeter was just hung without any damping and I believe this contributed sometimes to the reputation of the sound being a bit too metallic. The damping Magnepan uses works really well.
Part of the problem Magnepan had is that the ribbon tweeter is faster than the mid and bass drivers. This has been addressed the best way in the latest 3.7i and 20.7 models, as the mid and bass drivers use QR foil on the Bass/mid Mylar diaphragm sections and not aluminium wire (as per the older models). The QR foil is lighter and faster than the older Al wire so that helps, - the drivers are lighter. You can mod/upgrade any older 3 series Magnepan by stripping off the Al wire and changing for the QR foil.
As for fuses, - yes you can get better sound by bypassing. For models like the 1.7I that don’t have a ribbon tweeter that’s fine, and it’s also fine for the midrange of a 3 or 20 series, but it’s a no no for the true ribbon tweeter in a 3 or 20 series!. You need don’t want the ribbon to break so you need to give it some protection.
You can also upgrade the terminals etc, but perhaps biggest upgrades can be had from upgrading the frames or the passive XO components. For the 1.7 it will just be one series cap (and possibly a series resistor) on the tweeter panel and a series inductor on the bass panel. However I wouldn’t just change for any more pricey caps. Magnepan will have chosen caps to voice the speakers well. It would be necessary to measure the DC resistance of the inductor and caps to get similar values and voice the new components well by ear. Not totally simple as a quick upgrade, but with a 1.7 (or even a 3.7) it’s not expensive to try new components as the crossover slopes are all first order so there are few components. On the older models with mixes of 3rd, 2nd and 1st order crossover slopes there were many more components to upgrade. Even some models like the 3.6R used 4th order LP slopes on the bass LP, which is a lot of components.
Biamping (or triamping on a 3 series) can also work, but in my experience it’s better to use exactly the same power amp on each section to get coherence, and although detail is always better than single amp drive, biamping or Tramping never sounds quite as coherent as single amp passive speaker level drive IMO (but using the same amp for each section helps IMO). Some have different opinions on this. IIRC it’s not so easy to biamp the .7 models as there aren’t two sets of terminals. You must split things internally.
Good sound quality benefits in biamping could also be had by bypassing the speaker level tweeter cap and using a PLLXO (passive line level crossover) instead. In the case of a 1.7i that would mean using a single small cap at line level before the power amp (you calculate the correct value using 1/(2PI x C x f). The advantage is you can use a very high quality film and foil polypropylene cap or a polystyrene cap, which will be much higher quality than larger value speaker level caps. This is not a small upgrade and is worth doing. Even a cheap film and foil cap like a Wima FKP1 will work very well.
The 20.7 is a bargain for sound on offer. As you say it could outperform other speaker systems of many times the cost. The push pull drivers and greater bass driver area (that give better bass extension) make them a good step up from the 3.7i. The bass goes lower with less distortion levels, and is more punchy.
When my Dad bought his MGIIIs in 1986 we actually heard them against Isobariks in the same room. There was simply no contest. The Maggies were just so much better. So much more scale and soundstage. So much more detail, speed and much more extension and transparency in the top end. Cymbals sounded like proper cymbals, as you say. It’s amazing when you hear a 3 series (or 20 series) for the first time. As I say we’d never heard anything quite like it before.
Some people can find the ribbon tweeter on the 3 or 20 series models a bit too prominent but you can fine tune with attenuation resistors. The 1 ohm 10W wirewound resistors that Magnepan provide for this are far too much in value and attenuate too much IMO. I usually find between 0.35 to 0.5 ohms is more ideal. You can buy different wirewound values and when you have found a value that works well a good upgrade is to use five 2W film resistors in parallel instead of the single 10W wirewound.
Fine tuning this resistor value is very worthwhile for a 3 or 20 series owner. You can get the top end level exactly to your liking
The MGIIIa 3 series model that came after the MGIII model sounds a bit more forward and peaky in the mids than all the other 3 series models and I modded mine by changing the crossover slopes to the older MGIII spec (you just cut/disable one inductor in the external crossover box and another in the internal crossover - very easy to reverse). That gives a flatter and less peaky sound and gives you a speaker that sounds pretty much like an original MGIII. Some people however really like the forward midrange of the stock MGIIIa, so it’s a better of taste. If the ribbon tweeter is the 2 ohm version in later MGIIIa’s (and not the earlier 3 ohm tweeter) I change the internal tweeter resistor from 1 ohms to around 0.55 ohms, which improves the top end detail.
All the other 3 series models have a 3 ohm ribbon tweeter and don’t have an internal resistor, but you can add some attenuation (with a resistor) if you need to at the tweeter attenuation terminals.
Like I say, any of the older 3 way, 3 series models will give you a good performance upgrade over the 1.7i IMO, so you can buy secondhand if you are willing to risk the possibility of a little delam repair. A new 3.7i would cost over £8K but you could get an older 3 series from £1 to £1.5K or so.
Compared to the older models, the 3.7i does have the better QR foil on the mids and bass and all 1st order crossovers, so it’s more coherent, but you won’t be disappointed with any 3 series model of any age. As I say the performance of the ribbon, the bandwidth, and the scale are the same on all of these 3 series models. They are all the same size.
As they have higher order crossovers the older 3 series models will also play louder and with with less distortion than the 3.7i, which is a nice bonus. The 3.6R and 3.7i also have slightly less bass extension than the older models, so the older models are better for bass (they have a slightly larger bass panel area).
The MGIIIa’s on eBay would be a nice deal for someone, after some minor repairs and mods have been done. The MGIIIa has the most punchy bass of any 3 series models I’ve heard (better than the more recent 3.6 and 3.7). Not sure why, but many other people have also noticed that.
