[Emil]

from planars to flirt with boxes? What have you found? What brought you back?

I'm getting that itch with my 3.6s. Am I happy with Maggie? Sure! But its that "grass is greener...." that pops up time to time.

So who can save me from possible infidelity

[Rclark]

I periodically will bring my monitors in the room or run something borrowed. But you know what? Boxes just really excite the room too much. It smears everything. My Maggies by being directional reflect mostly front and back walls, and I'll eventually have some diffusion for that, but it's nothing like a box speaker, at all. Nulls rule!

I think the only way to run a box speaker and get the most out of it is to invest heavily in room treatments. For my monitors I also have Sanus UF-27 stands filled with sand. They are heavy.

So for myself, I'm not ready to run all sorts of different speakers, because I don't have any measurement rig, no absorbers, no diffusers. Maggies are the best type of speaker to run in a small to medium room if you have no treatment. Dipoles. at least.

That said, once I am set up to run different speaker types optimally, and I will be, then I want to add more speakers to the family. Man CAN live, very happily, by planar alone, mine are good enough to be "last speakers" imo, even though I've just started, but there are some very cool high tech box speakers I'm itching to try.

[Elizabeth]

I had Infinity bipole speakers way back. then some $200 Maggies which had an intermittent short.
Then some small boxes..for a year or two.
Then I bought my Magnepan 3.6.
I plan on keeping them until I croak.

[catastrofe]

I'm having thoughts of infidelity myself...better to do it with speakers than with another woman (another woman would end up costing a lot more in the long run).

Two prospects:  Zu Definition 4 and Legacy Aeris.

[Ron D]

I have strayed over the years but just this past weekend drove 7 hours round trip to pick up a pair of gently used 3.6s. Have owned a variety of Maggies since the 80s starting with the SMGa model but never made the jump to a ribbon 3 series until now...

[ptmconsulting]

Hey Emil - I went back to my box speakers for a while when I was working on the mods for my Apogees. Yes, it was pleasant, but different. When the Apogees were up and running there was just no going back to boxes, at least not on a permanent basis.

You will have to spend far more on boxes to compete with your Maggies. Doesn't mean you can't try it, just be prepared to go back.

[66mgb]

Before I got my Magnepan 2.7's ( new) then later 3.6's I had a system built by myself with Transmission line woofer, Kef Mid ranges, Ess Heil tweeter, all tri- amped with home built Nelson Pass designed electronics. It was good, but the Maggies were good enough I gave it up and never looked back. I have some Celstion SL6's in my garage system OK, but no Maggies.
Russ

[lowtech]

I'm having thoughts of infidelity myself...

Two prospects:  Zu Definition 4 and Legacy Aeris.

An even better prospect?  http://linkwitzlab.com/LX521/Description.htm

[SteveFord]

No.
I found the sound I like.

[Quiet Earth]

I confess...... I have strayed and not yet returned. 

I bought SoundLab Dynastats back in the 80's and was happy with them. Man, those were fun speakers. I should have kept them and just upgraded my amp and source, but instead I upgraded to A-2Xs, and later in the 90's the Auras. I was always looking for the perfect amp for those full range panels, but never found them in a price I could afford. The best I ever heard was Wolcott and Atmosphere. By the time I was ready to drop that much dough on the amplifier, I heard the single-ended triode sound and that was the end of electrostats for me. Like Elvis, I have left the building.

If I ever get back into planers it will probably be for some of those cool headphones. That might be a nice way of having two different, yet excellent sounding systems in the same room.

[SteveFord]

Shame on you, Quiet Earth.
How about the old switcheroo: planar speakers with some powerhouse amps and then SET for the headphones?
That might be a winning comination.

P.S.
I procrastinated a few years ago on some Wolcotts and when I went back to Audiogon they were indeed gone.
Guess it wasn't meant to be.

[medium jim]

Several years ago I was again building the dream system and I bought a pair of 1.6's and fell in love again.  Stupid me listened to all of the carp that they needed to be driven by SS amps with a zillion watts.   At that point in time I was using a Jolida 502 that was 60 watts of tube power and I bought in to the rhetoric and bought a used Bryston 4b sst2...a great amp, but too harsh even with attenuators for the highs.  I tried a Parasound HCA1500, it was better but didn't have the sweetness of the Jolida. 

I sold the 1.6's and bought several different speakers and settled on a pair of Kef 104/2's that were very close to the 1.6's in the ability to disappear into nothingness, but didn't have the sq in the mids or highs of the 1.6's....along this journey, I pickup up a pair of VAC made Marantz Model 9 Reissue monoblocks ....they drove the KEF's easy enough and they are also 4 ohm and only around 84db efficient. I got to thinking, gee I could drive maggies with them and my search was on in earnest for a pair of Magnepan's with true ribbons and was looking at getting a pair of 3.6's and my providence, a looked on Craigslist (which I never do) and found a pair of 2.5's that came from the estate of a sound engineer and I bought them.

I blew out one of the ribbons getting them home as I didn't have the protective aluminum strips...I replaced both ribbons for rebuilt ones from Magnepan and repaired some light panel/wire delamination....and was ready to go and have never looked over my shoulder since.   I did come close to buying a pair of Klipsch's though, but didn't.  I was lucky as the 2.5's had the X/O's upgraded by the original owner with better caps and I suspect to the 2.6 specs. 

I'm sure that at some point in the rest of my life I will get another set of speakers and they will be Magnepan's most likely. But that is only if the 2.5's die and cannot be rebuilt.

Jim

[ptmconsulting]

If you have tried cone/box speakers and now have planers but miss the chest thumping bass of a box speaker, then maybe its time to go in a completely different direction - horn speakers. Of course that means you will likely have to match a nice quiet tube amp to them instead of the powerhouse amp needed to drive a planer.

Or maybe you just need a better or different panel speaker type.

[Emil]

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Ok, Im over it.
Bought a bunch of new music yesterday and had a good listening session.

Seems new music keeps the spice in a relationship and keeps it from going stale

Ya know I could get some Mye stands. Hmmmm.....

[underdawg]

I myself find during the upgrade how much more difference a speaker can make over electronics.

[rooze]

I 'toiled' with a set of 3.6R's for a couple years and ditched them in favor of a pair of Apogee Caliper Sig's I'd had sitting in the closet 

Then invested heavily in dual stack Oris 150 Horns with huge bass cabinets. Dillied around with SET's and various low-powered stuff then finally blew a gasket and sold everything.

Now I'm back with the best investment yet - Carver Amazing (Original/Platinum hybrid). Planar virtues with good old fashioned chest thumping bass. I couldn't be (much) happier 

[josh358]

My favorite bass is still Tympani bass, since it combines near-dynamic slam with planar realism. If I wanted to go all the way down to 14 Hz, I'd add a pair of subs. But I have yet to hear dynamic midbass that sounds realistic to me -- may be a single or double bass array, but that's quite an investment. It isn't just the drivers and the cabinet, it's the way they interact with the room -- dipole bass excites fewer room modes. (Dipole dynamic woofers as in the Linkwitz's are of course a possibility, as is the interesting strategy of locating your subs right behind the listening seat, at which point they're essentially minimum phase and you can equalize them flat.)

I don't like horns. But personal driver preferences aside, I think it's hard to go from line source dipoles to anything else. You're just giving up too much spatial realism and as someone pointed out, you have to pay much more to get similar sound quality. Though line source point sources like the Linkwitzes do a good job if you don't mind sacrificing the sense of height.

[jsm71]

People flock to planars because of what they do well, not because they love large (typically) tall slabs dominating the room.  The real question is can those properties be realized with a box?  I would put accurate soundstage, 3D imaging, cohesion, and realism as the list of properties to target.  Panel size and cost are variable and only trigger the degree of commitment one is capable or willing to aim for. 

I have strayed away from Dipole planars to a monopole planar hybrid (in a box), the Janszen zA2.1s.  The Janszen electrostatic panels are indeed dipole by design but installed in a box with the rear wave defeated.  I have found that the box design used presents amazing soundstage with depth without having to use a backwave.  Being a monopole the speakers only need to be out into the room a little bit to sound best.  Fully against the wall actually works as well but is not optimal. 

Full dipoles of course need plenty of back wave space to generate the magic.  My Maggie 1.7s also generated some degree of false? echo on all recordings even if that was not intended, at least in my room.  I never minded that phenomonon, but the Janszens reveal hall accoustics very accurately if it is on the recording, but not if its not.  I find this more truthful to the recording.  The stat panel's clarity, realism, and transparency are top tier and what one expects from that type of driver.  The midrange bloom is heavenly and as good as it gets as far as what I have heard.  The dual bass woofers in each cabinet form a line source for the bass and contribute to a high degree of cohesion.  With solo piano that travels above and below the crossover I haven't been able to pinpoint when that happens at all.  Well done and with no tonal shift.  Oh, and the cone woofers do that punch and slam thing better than full range planars.

Using a box is not a bad thing if the drivers used and the box design doesn't limit the quality goals stated above.  Point Source boxes implemented without regard to defeating the things we hate would drive me back to planars in a heartbeat.  If not a planar, some other approach that did what was important.

[Davey]

Josh,

A line source point source?  What is that? 

Are you characterizing the "sacrifice of sense of height" of smaller speakers a bad thing?  I actually think that's a good thing.  Magnepan's accenuate the sense of height unnaturally...IMHO.  (One of their few drawbacks actually.)

Cheers,

Dave.

[josh358]

Josh,

A line source point source?  What is that? 

Are you characterizing the "sacrifice of sense of height" of smaller speakers a bad thing?  I actually think that's a good thing.  Magnepan's accenuate the sense of height unnaturally...IMHO.  (One of their few drawbacks actually.)

Cheers,

Dave.

Oops, incipient senility strikes again -- I meant to type "dipole point source."

You and Linkwitz are on the same page with regard to preferring point source height. I don't think either approach can be said to be accurate, since the shape of the wavefront depends on distance. Monopoles are great for reproducing infinitely small instruments located in the speaker plane, line sources for reproducing instruments located at infinity in one dimension and at the speaker plane in another. In practice, the one that sounds right seems to depend on the program material. You'd need wave field synthesis to do it right.

However, Satie makes an excellent point which is that line sources can to some extent reproduce instrument height because they don't mask the floor bounce in the recording. My own sense is that full-height line sources are more realistic, since point sources sound like the sound is emerging from a slit in the case of a small driver or from different heights for different frequencies for a large one. But this is also going to depend on room acoustics.