Our Story
Or, How we all got here
Magnepan speakers are without question unique in the high end industry, and not just because of their shape and design principles. What makes them unique is the design seems capable of almost limitless possibilities, yet they are produced at a very basic and modest level of operation.
For whatever reason their design envelope was never pushed by the parent company who seem happiest making them affordable and a value for the money. In light of that numerous people have taken it upon themselves to alter, tweak and "pump up" their maggies over the years. Modifications tend to be confined to:
Making some sort of stand, and possibly raising or straightening them
Replacing the crossover components with better parts
Installing struts to "stiffen" the frames
What instantly struck me about all this modding was how varied the methods, parts and processes chosen were. There was no agreement or unifying principle or even an understanding of what it was they were trying to fix. The only statement that even seemed to get universal support is "Just mod them some way, it will improve them." While confusing it highlights one truth - Something is wrong about the design and it needs to be found and fixed. That being the case "just doing anything" is not the solution. If there is a flaw then the only way to improve them would be finding and fixing that flaw. Since it appeared this had not been done and no one could even agree on what the real issues were, I made it my mission to find out.
What was also obvious was that there are those who “control” the narrative online about these speakers and they do not and will not tolerate any deviation from their dogma. They have decreed what the “solution” is… and don’t you dare contest it. The only problem is they are completely wrong. According to them the problem with Magnepans is they are not “stiff” enough, and not raised off the floor enough (and or vertical enough) Just a second of clear comprehension shows how literally absurd these notions are.
Magnepans already resemble ironing boards. They are made in MDF frames. MDF does not bend. In fact if you try it snaps. How much “stiffer” could they literally be? I used to ask people how much they “swayed” before they stiffened them… and would usually get attacked for my insolence. This isn’t just an incorrect idea, it is an insane one. The frame of stock Magnepans is not moving when they play… all you have to do to check this is hold it when they are playing. You will feel hardly anything, and yet this bizarre belief, this idiocy, this dogma, will not die. People STILL believe it. That is because like all corrupt media, they indoctrinate every new person looking for help with the lie, who assume they are being told the truth, and so the lie gets a new generation of believers. In fact it’s so ingrained I am surprised nobody has tried dipping them in starch overnight to solve this “problem”.
As for the next bit, that’s even more hilarious. Their contention is a speaker that is already almost 6 foot tall isn’t high enough. The only thing higher is the person who believes that. I’ve spent many enjoyable evenings listening to bookshelf speakers 3 feet above the floor. I suppose they didn’t know they had to be raised up… and a good stiffening would probably do them wonders too. If you accept the gospel of strangers without giving what they say one second of clear thought… well, you deserve what you get.
So why does it get traction? The fact is if you make a change you are making a change and changes will effect the sound. It is also a fact that few people put trust in their own ears, so they do something to the speaker… the speaker responds and sounds different, and that validates the action. For stiffening they usually install some sort of strut and or add ridiculous amounts of weight. The problem here is that will yield some benefit, but not because it increased stiffness. It works because what they did enabled the speaker to bleed a little more vibration to the floor. Not a lot, but enough to be audible and so the lunacy of stiffness is validated, and so the fallacy of it never dies.
For several years I experimented with not only the stand and its design, but the crossover and components for it. While it may all seem obvious now, for a long time it was difficult and took trial, error and time, often because past assumptions or "truths" like I noted above all proved incorrect. The end result therefore didn't just "happen", and it's also not a guess. It is the culmination of years of research.
Up to now, most people utilized steel when making stands to eliminate this “stiffness”, which I can only attribute to the fact that's it's generally easier to drill a hole and insert a bolt than do woodwork. Yet even those who used wood only made either bases or struts or added massive and frankly ridiculous amounts of weight. - the mdf was never replaced.
All vertical placement does is make them beam. Like a flashlight, that direct beam may seem like an improvement due to increased strength (in this case dbl or SP levels) but if you stop and really listen and consider, do you want that any more than you want a flashlight beam in the eyes? What's more, gaining this increase happens at the cost of ambience, musicality and even bass reproduction. (Magnepan itself for the majority of the companies life chose to tip most models) A tipped flashlight gives an ambient light, a tipped maggie gives an ambient sound and it also improves its bass response.
Magnepan speakers in stock form have a few issues, but they have one major problem. Vibration. It is the biggest source of sound degradation maggies have. If you observe a pair of maggies playing moderately loudly with their socks off you will see more vibrating on the driver than you would have imagined, and in fact some people manage to get theirs to make a "slapping" noise. (It even has a name - Maggie Slap) This is caused by the mylar actually striking the pole piece, and is caused by the owner driving them hard with an under powered amp and the amp actually loses control of the driver. This is bad for the sound, and dangerous for the amp.
Magnepans make sound by vibrating a flat sheet of mylar attached to a steel frame and pole piece. Traditional drivers make sound by the excursion of a paper cone attached to a rubber surround. In their case, the sound is made, the cone moves and the energy created is absorbed by the rubber surround and eliminated (mostly) and so the cone is free to generate the next impulse. However vibrations on a Magnepan driver have nowhere to go. They hit the MDF frame, which refuses vibration, and so they remain stuck where they are - On the driver.
Therefore a large portion of all vibrational energy created has no choice but to return to the driver from whence it came where it meets and destroys those new waves being formed, with the net result being major loss of detail and smear. To see this visualized play the video below of multiple wave point sources acting upon one another. What starts as a clear field soon becomes a mess. Now imagine what goes on when an entire driver is countless source points, all trying to make a clear and clean wave. The fact is they simply cannot.
Sadly, for many years people misunderstood why this smear happened and incorrectly assumed the problem was that the speakers were moving or shaking . They tried to solve this non existent problem by "stiffening" the panels as I already noted, and they did so with struts and metal frames and since adding these things requires a base or arm it comes together in a triangle. This triangle naturally provides more floor coupling which allows more of the vibrational energy to bleed off into the floor than would normally escape the frame. However only a smaller amount more is getting off and they are not solving the inherent problem because "stiffness" isn't the actual problem. However because a small increase in resolution happens, they believe what they are doing is correct.
However the real problem lies in the fact that the MDF frame refuses to take up and diffuse the vibrations the maggie driver makes. Imagine the maggie driver as a concrete swimming pool filled with water and the waves generated stem from a rock thrown into it's center. This first wave set is beautiful and very clear and distinct. However when it reaches the concrete wall it has nowhere else to go, whereupon it rebounds back in the direction it came from.
When this wave front collides with the next set of waves it makes "choppy water" which is no longer clear or beautiful and that is exactly what a maggie driver in MDF looks like when playing and sounds like when playing - Choppy Water. The solution therefore is to remove these waves entirely and stiffening will not do that.
In fact being stiff is the problem.
I have also always felt that Magnepans are one of the very few speakers that are less speakers than they are really musical instruments. They are organic. They should be treated that way, and if you do that the reward you get is astounding.
Fortunately it turns out that there is an ideal medium which can solve our problem: Wood. It has the natural ability to absorb vibrational energy and diffuse it. In fact, that is one of the main jobs it was designed to do. It's cell structure is compliant - it can shift - and this shifting ability allows it to turn vibrational energy into friction which turns it into heat which the wood then dissipates. An interesting thing I discovered is if you hold a stock maggie by the MDF frame while playing, you really don't feel a lot of vibration, but if you look at the driver it will be bouncing all over the place. If you hold one of my frames while playing the amount of vibrational energy one can feel is startling, however if you look at the driver, no movement can be seen, even at high volumes. The sound you'll hear proves I am correct, and the fact that my frames move and vibrate so much while doing this disproves the "stiffening" argument as well. It's like the suspension of a car, it moves and bounces in response to a bad road so the occupants do not. You don't "stiffen" a car to make the ride smoother, you install a system that can absorb the shock, which is what we are doing to these speakers.
Magnestand frames accept the wave energy reaching them and turn it into heat thru cell friction and simply bleed it off, therefore it NEVER goes back into the driver and that energy never contaminates the subsequent waves. What you get is one of the purest sounds in audio, which has been compared to and even beaten electrostats in its delicacy and beauty.
We do still use struts in the design because they add to the over all strength, but I have played modded maggies without them installed and I have yet to be able to say I can tell a difference. That's because the wood frame is doing the job so completely that there is nothing left for struts to really do as far as draining away wave energy and "stiffening" as we've proven is not a real issue.
Some people allow themselves to become confused by the use of the wooden frame, and seem to think it is done entirely for visual purposes and that it has no effect on the sound. I do not know why they assume this. Possibly because if it worked, why are not all speakers made using it? The reason is you can’t. Box speakers, to function, must have sealed enclosures. You cannot make a solid box out of wood and have it remain “sealed”. The wood will constantly expand and contract at different rates until it breaks itself apart. This is why the trade of Joinery was invented, and why every box speaker is made from MDF and covered in veneer. That said, as long as we are using wood, it would be foolish to not make them as attractive as possible. That is just another of the many side benefits.
Vibration however isn’t the only issue these speakers have. There are two parts to this equation and that brings us to the crossover. Years ago I noticed posts online where people would comment that they pulled their old SMGa's out of the closet when they had gotten tired of their main system and they were amazed at "how damn good" the SMGa's sounded. You would see these comments often, and replies would always be in agreement. The model was regarded as "magical". I looked into this magic and discovered the source: It had a very unusual crossover unlike any used in any other production maggie. Since it is true that all maggies are essentially the same, they only get bigger, it seemed reasonable to assume that if this crossover was so damn good, it could (and should) be applied to every model.
This design is a shared, 1st order series with a 6 dbl slope and what is interesting is it makes both voice coils on the maggie driver use a "shared" input. There are not 4 "in" wires, (2 to each voice coil) there are only 3 and each voice coil shares this third positive and negative lead. (the XO components essentially stop the drivers from seeing the signal which would short them) It is my feeling that this method effectively turns the two separate elements on the single maggie driver back into a single, coherent one. Some have claimed this unifying notion is impossible and not technically correct, however listening is the proof of the pudding here and there is no question that is exactly what it sounds like it does, and it's what everyone who hears it says it sounds like. So others can have their semantic wars about it, but for me, if it quacks like a duck...
Another side benefit of this crossover is it's efficiency raises the decibel output of every maggie it is used on from around the stock 86 dbl to about 92 dbl. Again, there are trolls who claim this is impossible. However customers have metered and verified it, and in fact Magnepans own stated specs for the SMGa claim it is 92 dbl. Trolls gotta troll…. That said, don’t use this info as an excuse to try to use what would normally be an under powered amplifier for these speakers. This dbl gain is just another of the many little perks that come with the mod, and to utilize them in full your approach to how you use, power and play these speakers should not change, for only then will you realize them.
With the help of a computer aided technician friend we have adapted this crossover design and applied it successfully to all models from the MMG to the 3.6 and older ones like the MG-I and MG-II series. In choosing the components to use for it, I wanted detail but did not wish to lose the inherent warmth of the speakers. After a long trial period I selected inductors, capacitors and resistors based on performance, not cost, and selected those which could deliver warmth and detail without adding grain or edge. Musicality was most important, and fatigue must never be an issue. You can read more about the parts used on the Pricing & Build Info page.
The result was a crossover worthy of the frames and neither is limited by the other in any way, and in fact they are greater than the sum of their parts. The crossovers get built into matching custom wooden boxes (every pair is different) which feature Vampire binding posts. This box then "rides" on the plinth on Herbies Isolation Dots which allows the boxes weight to be added to the panels over all mass yet completely isolates the crossover from all vibrations. This gives the listener the clearest window into the music possible. The fuses are also permanently removed from the speaker because as far as Maggies go, "No fuse is good fuse".
So that’s it. Get rid of the vibration, use the best crossover design and don’t use crappy parts. Like most puzzles, it’s so obvious when finally seen clearly that you wonder why it took so long to figure out. What’s harder to understand is why some still refuse to see it.
