[Robin Hood]

Just to pipe in, these are NOT just larger 3.7s.
The 20.7s are a different animal due to their construction; I don't think that any of the reviews really get that point across.

Very true and so is the reverse, the 3.7s are not just smaller 20.7s.  Perhaps it is the stiffer frame or the double-sided magnet structure of the bass and midrange panels. I have heard the stock 20.7s and they sound simply magical.  I believe if your smaller room has problems, Magnepan has several options to attenuate the bass or mid-bass from the panels.  Of course with the Mye stands and two DWMs I would assume the 3.7i's sound pretty spectacular, though I have not heard that combination.

[SteveFord]

A year or two back I asked Wendell if there was a way to get the 20.7 sound out of the 3.7s so you'd have a more manageable package and his answer was you can't.
That's when I began my campaign for a smaller 20.7 but I was told that the estimated cost ($10,000) would be prohibitive.

[a.wayne]

I would want 36' x 24' for them. 
That way I'd have room behind them, room behind me, I could spread them out a fair bit and I wouldn't feel like I had to sit up on a bar stool.
One thing that nobody mentions is that the mylar starts pretty high up on the panel.  For my couch the 3.7s were too low, the 20.7s were too high.  Sounds like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I know. 
But I don't have a 36 x 24' living room so the 20.7s went to a new home and I went back to 3.7s and put them on top of some very short stands made from an old dining room table.
The sound quality isn't nearly the same but at least I don't have Brian Eno's tape loop trying to drill a hole in my head which is a good thing.
One final thought: people said to stick an equalizer into the mix to tame the wild bass notes but I really don't want to go that route.  Maybe that's a mistake on my part and I was just being stubborn for no reason, I dunno.

They (20.7) must  be completly different from 20.1 's, as a friend had his 20.1 in a room about the size you recommend and they sounded like large tweeters no matter what he did with them......

[SteveFord]

I can't answer that one as I never heard the 20.1s.
No shortage of bass with the 20.7s, that's for sure.
If your friendly local dealer has a pair go give a listen.

[a.wayne]

My friendly local dealer has two  problems ,

1. Their are not friendly
2. Never ever , ever, heard anything there i would take home , very poor setups ...


Typically like this , come in and hear the new 1.7 , ok we did the bass was horrible , sounds like the bass panel was lifted by about 9 db over normal , ok , in next room. 20.1 already setup and going , i then suggest let us hear the 20.1, after all my skewed logic is this if i hear the top of any speaker company line and its Meh, then why waste time with the lower stuff ...

1.sorry you have to make an appointment to hear it
2. Are you in the market for one ...


So let me get this right , i have already committed  3 hrs of valuable time to be here and now being told i need an appointment while being talked down to. Typical arse wipe attitude from most of them for decades  , i cant wait for all of them to go out of business ....

Best thing ever happened to audiophiles and manufacturers (small) is the  internet , buy listen , sell repeat , so no i wont be calling anyone for an appointment to listen to hi -fi gear and be spoken down to by ignoramuses selling bad audio .


Everytime i see one go i raise my glass ...... :)

[josh358]

The room size issue is a complex on. A few points:

Bass:

- Bass performance differs dramatically between rooms depending on how the room modes line up. Thus the same speaker can be perceived as having too much, too little, or just enough bass in different rooms of the same size.

- On *average* the smaller the room, the more and rougher the bass.

- Open-baffle speakers like planars couple to the room reflections in a very interesting way. If they are close to a room surface, the effective baffle size increases and this increases bass output by reducing dipole cancellation. Since dipoles have a built-in 6 dB/octave amplitude response rise in the bass the effect of this can be profound -- a small room starts to look like an infinite baffle and you hear that bass boost!

- Dipoles also exhibit a rising bass response when you listen in the near field

Magnepan can only design their speakers to work in a listening room of average dimensions. This is why they recommend the DWM in rooms where bass output is inadequate. In rooms where there is too much output, equalization can be used. I would rather use a dipole with too much bass and equalization than one that is ideally matched because it means he woofer is driven less, increasing bass slam!

I think any speaker sounds better with bass EQ than without it, because real-world bass is so rough that they outweigh the sonic liabilities of another step in the signal chain (which are non-existent if your chain is digital, you are correcting for a minimum phase anomaly, and you cut rather than boost).

- Because the ear judges space in part by measuring the time difference between the direct and reflected sound, to reproduce a convincing sense of space, early reflections have to arrive at the ear *after* the early reflections in the recording venue, which is almost always larger than the listening room (sometimes artificially so)

- It's really very simple -- the path followed by the reflection should be longer than the path in the original recording. I've heard that Maggies continue to exhibit more depth past 15' from the front wall! In practice, a 10 msec delay -- about 5' from the wall == is the minimum you want to go for, since that's the point at which the ear starts hearing reflections as spatial ambiance

- The ear actually prefers to hear reflections from the side and rear rather than the front

- Since most of us can't move our speakers 15' out from the front wall, diffusion can help. If the early reflections are more than about 20 dB down from the direct sound, they won't interfere much with the sense of acoustic space.

- Diffusion has the advantage of saving reverberant energy which will then be scrambled (a good thing since the ear wants to hear ambiance with low interaural cross-correlation) and reflected from other surfaces. Preserving at least some of this ambient energy is vital in two-channel stereo. Without sufficient room reverb, the sound takes on a dry recording studio quality -- very detailed, but not very satisfying.

- Some absorption is needed to attenuate high frequencies.

Finally

- As Magnepan points out, their large speakers can be acoustically smaller than their small ones -- meaning that the acoustic centers of the drivers are closer together. This is presumably true when one moves from the two-way to the true ribbon models, but not within the lineups, where the opposite is mostly true. This allows you to hear a good lateral image from closer up.