I am a former owner of the Maggie 3.6 , for 5 years, and now own the Gallo 3.1. Like many speakers there are strengths and weaknesses, but overall, I enjoy the Gallo’s more due to their ability to portray live reproduction and musical impact. Mines hasn’t even been fully broken in yet.
The design of the Gallo’s is rather ingenious. They eliminated or minimize all the flaws associated with most speaker design like parallel walls, baffle, minimal xover, and coloration from large enclosures. There are many great speakers that have those in their design, but then you have to redesign and add cost back in to minimize their effects. Many speakers spend up to 70% (some more) of the cost on enclosures to thicken the walls, use material that minimize resonance, brace enclosure, line and stuff with sound absorption, multiple coatings of paint and lacquer, expensive xover parts (no matter how expensive, if you can design one that doesn’t use one or minimal xover use, the better). I prefer to purchase a speaker from a company that focus their R&D on music reproduction then to focus on giving me a beautiful enclosure, if I want beautiful furniture, I’ll go to Thomasville. And in the case of Magnepan there is no enclosure, which is one reason they sound so palpable.
Some of the difference that I hear between the Gallo’s and Maggies are:
Bass: The bass from the Gallo’s have much more of a presence and impact, there’s no surprise here, one of the well known weaknesses of Magnepan speakers is their ability to reproduce the bass the hits you in the guts. The Maggies do go low at times, but sometime it is more of a one bass note or a drone, whereas the Gallo’s can sweep you with layers of articulate bass and impactful whacks.
Treble: This is a toss up, they both reproduce the highs very well, better then any tweeter that I’ve encountered. They both have that airy realistic shimmer when playing the high frequencies. The Gallo’s have much better dispersion by design, whereas the Maggies are relegated to a narrow listening area. They both have the advantage of minimal interaction with the ceiling and floors compared with a typical round tweeter. Would love to hear the B&W diamond tweeter to see it compares with these 2 design.
Midrange: Toss up again, maybe slight advantage to the Maggies.
Driver integration and dipole vs monopole: Surprise to me here, to my ears the Gallo’s drivers integrate very well and sound seamless even though material, size, and shape are different. Personally, I hear some textural differences between the Magnepan ribbon driver and main panels (not necessarily differences big enough to call "discontinuities," but audible differences nevertheless). Thus, with Magnepans, I rarely lose the sense of there being two distinct types of planar drivers at work. In contrast, there is no crossover at all (at least not in the usual sense) between the Gallo midrange drivers and tweeter, so that even though these drivers are made of dissimilar materials and use different operating principles, they do an amazingly good job of speaking with one common voice.. One other though I had regarding the the wave launch from the different drivers. Carefully and properly positioned, dipoles can sound pretty amazing, but there is no getting around the fact that managing their output to the rear is a tricky proposition--one that sometimes involves tradeoffs (as in discovering that the room position that optimizes bass extension may or may not yield the best overall imagining and soundstaging). By contrast, the Gallos are very easy to place for good results, and their imaging/soundstaging is relatively foolproof (provided you keep them away from nearby reflective surfaces). With the dipole effect from Maggie, you get that airy and sultry sound that so many people love, but in real life how many instruments launch sound equally to the front and back? The Gallo’s in this sense portray a more realistic sound wave source and size. Reproduction from a bugle, drum, clarinet, etc, is better from a small point source then from a large panel. But the sound of a grand piano is intoxicating from the Maggies.
Soundstage: They both have tremendous strengths in this area, throwing a huge soundstage and rendering live performance right in front of you. Of course the Maggies win the image height contest, you’re ok if you’re seated with the Gallo’s, but stand up and you lose it. They are both very holographic but I find the Gallo’s pinpoint imaging better, this could be due to the size of the Maggies. The size of the Maggies seems to be an issue with reproducing some music and sound. I find that when listening to solo musical instrument or people, it is literally bigger then life as mentioned before.
Overall sound: One area that the Maggies do not do as well is when playing complex musical passages that involve a lot of instruments, especially rock. The separation from the Gallos’s provide better instrument identity and placement. They are superb with all genres of music. The Maggies do very well with jazz, small percussion band, and solo, also classical sounds nice and large. Gallo’s sound great at low or high volume, Maggies mostly at the higher volume. One area that I miss about Maggies is that you can’t beat their wall of sound during HT duties. The sound puts you in the middle of the action.
Other considerations: Maggies are very difficult to place and they do dominate the room. I eventually grew tire of their looks, maybe because more then a few people said “what are those doors doing in the middle of the room?” The Gallo’s material and construction are first rate, they’ll last a lifetime. The enclosure grill looks like a DIY’fer could replace if it gets bang up, so it is very kid friendly.
Both require long break-in to sound their best. There are plenty of glowing reviews out there on both, although mostly on the Gallo 3 not 3.1. Good luck on your search, it really depends on your ears.
