How did you like those Magnepans? I thought about ribbon speakers but they were a bit outside the loop when I last bought speakers in about 1990. I went with the Kef Reference 104/2. But I’ve always been curious about the Magnepans.
Maggies are pretty unique. If you’ve got the room and the system for them, they pull off a disappearing act that few other speakers can. Overall system synergy becomes critical. There are a lot of perfectly good preamps, power amps, interconnects, speaker cables and CD players that will sound just dreadful if they’re combined poorly and especially so with the larger Magnepans. Hence my original choices of speaker cables and interconnects.
Hard to get a good demo of the Mageplanars, though. It’s really too much trouble for most dealers and most end users (that’s you and me) to take the time, trouble and dollars to get it all right. But man oh man. If you do take the trouble, the reward is jaw-dropping realism and musicality. Properly set up and driven, nothing in their price range approaches the coherency, focus and soundstaging that these speakers will deliver. They are absolutely electrifying, and about as far from ‘hi-fi’ as one could get. And nothing else even close to their price range will utterly disappear as these will when all else is right.
I think that the lack of pinpoint detail and imaging - that is, images too large or out of proportion - that some mention is more of a function of something amiss in the upstream components than the speakers themselves. Case in point - Loreena McKennit singing ‘Dante’s Prayer’ on her ‘Book of Secrets’ album is in perfect proportion as portrayed by my former system. There was no sense of a five foot wide pair of lips (Mick Jagger would be another matter, though). The cello on that piece sounds like its size, as does the piano and they’re right there in the room with you. And the proportional relationship of McKennit’s voice and the accompanying instruments don’t change as the volume is raised and lowered - only your listening perspective does.
The ‘trouble’ with Magnepans is that they WILL let you hear what’s wrong elsewhere. For example, you’ll discover why Monster cable sucks and why Cardas doesn’t. You’ll hear the true noise floor of your system and you’ll be blown away when you eliminate the source of such noise - by direct-connecting your CD player to your power amp with balanced cables. You’ll be able to hear which CD players (and CDs) sound the least ‘digital’ and which ones sound like cardboard cutouts of the music.
Hope this helps.