Are you saying that if we could very accurately modify the MMG or the 1.6 crossover to match the other the results would still sound different owing to some level of improved detail/focus/etc that's inherent in the 1.6 transducers but not the MMG's?
Hi Davey - Yes, that's right, the added detail makes the listening experience qualitatively different.
I was thinking about this issue overnight - because the original post is pretty interesting -- and they way I'd put it generally is that Maggie enthusiasts and audiophiles in general are a self-selected group which tends to value certain audio reproduction qualities. But those qualities are not necessarily shared by other serious music fans. I focussed on level of detail reproduced earlier in the thread, but here's another one: the better your system is, the more relentlessly it exposes engineering weaknesses in the recording. I can see a reasonable serious music fan consider that a significant drawback - and in fact have been advised to lower the performance point of my system because it made listening to bad engineering even more difficult.
There's a sort of group ideology working among Maggie enthusiasts/audiophiles. Experiences like deciding that one actually prefers the MMGs to the 1.6s in the final analysis is a piece of evidence that doesn't fit the ideology. Maybe the reason I've found the observation so intriguing is that like the threadstarter I moved from stock MMGs to a modded version of the speaker which is objectively much better, but which I think I enjoy equally.
