The Official Magnepan Owners Thread - Page 82

Rythmik subs have speaker-level input on some amps. Integration* really means getting the sub and speaker in phase at the crossover point and the continuous phase adjustment allows you to do that. Realistically you won't miss one cycle if the phasing is correct.

You could also pull the amp and swap the leads on the sub's speaker.

* Integration with the mains; integration with the room requires finding the optimal placement and settings to provide the best frequency and time response.

DMW panel ordered today. Should have in a month or so, hopefully sooner than later
I think I'm heading in the right direction, hoping anyway.

I just got the Chris Botti in Boston BD and played it last night. Hmmm, sure sounded different on some songs I listened to at the dealer's store. I know there's a lot of factors besides the CCR center, but the difference between the sound in my setup vs. the dealer's was so striking it floored me a bit

I had never thought the CC3 was that far off the beam in any recording or movie before. Sure it was a bit thin sounding vs. 3.6's but not that far off.

On one song with Sting and a classical vocalist (great voice!), using PLIIx on 2 ch PCM track (the TrueHD track had much less spaciousness - hey, recording engineers, this is a 7.1 track - why don't you actually use the surrounds? Besides the dealer used PLIIx. In this song, when Sting sang, there was hardly any apparent sound coming from the center and I KNOW this is not what I experienced in the demo nor with all the movies, multichannel music I have (lots!) or cable.

I'm at a loss to explain why I heard what I heard in his demo room compared to mine. In all fairness, the dealer said his room, spacing between his 3.7's (at least 2X wider than mine), space around the speakers, better processor, analog from a $10K player vs my Oppo's HDMI - all add to the difference.

I tinkered with setting for 2 hrs last night, boosted my CC3 level to max, varied the center width, turned EQ off, changed fronts from Large to Small. Boosting the center seemed to make the most difference. But the level set with Pioneer MCACC is just fine with SACD's/DVD-A's/movies so what is it about this particular recording and especially Sting's vocals that made the center almost disappear. Botti's trumpet & other vocalists come thru A-OK

For the very 1st time in 8 years, I sort of felt a bit let down with my system, never thought I'd ever feel that way

I'll start with the DWM and let you all know how it goes. I can always look at the CC5 or CCR.
Edited by ss9001 - 6/22/12 at 1:57pm

I did not hear such a large difference between CC3 and CCR. I bet most of the difference is in the room and related speaker placement... I have always had better sound in my room than at the dealer, unless it was one I worked for and had the leeway to properly set up the demo room.

Of course, for me, if the trumpet comes through OK, what else matters?

And I agree
Even the dealer agrees that room and speaker location is the biggest factor.

As a horn man, you can appreciate this - Botti did a Miles Davis song from Kind of Blue. Great stuff; he's very good but not quite a Miles Davis Early Miles anyway. I swear on one song he did a riff that reminded me of good old Maynard Ferguson. Didn't quite reach those stratospheric hi note squeals of Maynard's but close

Yup, he came thru clear as a bell on the center, so what am I complaining about again?

The dealer did suggest I try the CCR in my home, which I was glad he offered before I asked Probably do that at the same time I pick up the DWM at his store.

Interestingly, Wendell at Magnepan suggested the CC5 might suit my needs (mostly HT) which would sure make my wallet happy. I could sell the 3 and jumping to the 5 would only be a few hundred out of pocket. Another option...

Do those subs have a "phase" switch? Also there are test disks that have a "phase" track on them.

There's photos of the rear panel for all the models on their website.
That said, some models do, some don't. I suggest you go to their site and check the specific models you may be interested in.
Edited by ss9001 - 6/23/12 at 3:21pm

DonH50

I think I figured out part of the difference in soundstage, maybe the biggest part. It hit me this afternoon, while watching one of the Resident Evil movies with a very bombastic soundtrack and the sound from the CC3 was just superb, no complaints, just like it's always been.

Not only does my dealer have 10ft or so distance between the 3.7's, he also has tweeters in, while mine are tweeters out. I think it just turned out that Sting's vocals on that one song were hard panned left and not well blended with the center because the outside tweeter pulled his voice that way. Plus the 3.7's are supposed to be inherently more seamless than the 3.6's with less disparity between the drivers due to freq shifts. Inside tweeters with such a large spacing would naturally tend to fill in the gap more than my configuration.

I don't know why that didn't occur to me Thurs night. But I didn't

They have a continuous phase adjustment knob, one of the reasons I chose them. They also have a single-band PEQ, very useful for those of us like me with AVRs (Pioneer) that do not EQ the sub. The main reason I bought it is the servo control and great "sound" as well as ease of integration with my Maggies.
Edited by DonH50 - 6/23/12 at 3:30pm

Cool! I have flip-flopped over the years and rooms on tweeer position. As a matter of fact, although I changed them several times whilst making measurements and listening tests over the past year or two, I am actually not sure where they are in my present setup. I am essentially in the near field in a heavily-treated room so somewhat less sensitive to position than some of my past settings.

Thanks for the info about Chris Botti; amazingly enough, I do not have any of his CDs! Have several Miles and a bunch of other players, natch... At the moment I am trying to practice for a show next week, but smoke from the fire just a little south of us is killing me... That and the thought that, as much as I need to practice, I also need to be getting our "get out" kit together.

That would be a good thing for the OP to do. I am not in the market for a sub and I don't have his problem. I was trying to suggest that he check before considering that brand.

^^
gotcha - sorry I misunderstood the exchange

and
good luck waiting the fires out, hope it stays clear of you
Edited by ss9001 - 6/24/12 at 5:44am

As a follow up to my post on 5/22, my old IIBs are dead as a doornail. Very sad. After careful consideration, I decided to take a chance on the MMGs rather than rebuild mine. I can't physically rebuild them myself, and the cost of sendin them to MN for rebuilding is more than the price of the MMGs. Plus it would be the original Planar-Magnetic technology, not the quasi-ribbons. I guess I'll list them for sale extremely cheaply to someone who wants to rebuild them.

The MMGs arrived yesterday. I set them up quickly and commenced to listen, fully prepared to burst into tears at the sound of virgin Maggies which are not yet broken in. Mixed emotions followed. For the moment, they're hooked up to a 5-channel receiver that puts out 170w into 4 ohms. Sounded muddy as hell at first, till I realized a few stupid mistakes, such as the SACD/ DVD player feeding the sound via HDMI through the TV, instead of the optical cable, with a low level of sound coming through the TV speakers. Oyyyy!

Okay, got that and a few other equally stupid things straightened out. Then came the issue of placement. We all know how long that takes. This room is a lot more "live" than the two rooms I had the IIBs set up in. It's definitely going to need treatment. This is a rough diagram of the room. The floor is wood, the walls are wallboard, the ceiling is 8'. The living room is fully open to the hallway and dining room, which are fully carpeted. The light blue rectangles are 3 chairs and a sofa. The wide bow window in the front and the open hallway make the side reflections quite asymmetrical. The Maggies are currently 54" apart and 36" from the wall.



The first real issue: The MMGs are tiny! I knew their dimensions, but still! Compared to the IIBs, they seem like toys. The sound propagation is definitely different. Sigh...

So do I need the 1.7s, which would would totally destroy my budget? Dunno. I've got 60 days to decide, and I've barely eeked out the possibilities. Gotta hook up the 300w/channel Carver amp, gotta move one of the rugs in front of the speakers, gotta play with tweeters in vs. tweeters out, etc. You know the drill.

I did get them more focussed last night, started to feel the sound stage snap into place. It IS exciting!

More to follow.

Does anyone have a CC5 or MMC1's or MMC2's they would like to sell?

Thanks,

David

Do you think you will upgrade to the 1.7 or beyond?

I've been slow to get them set up and dialed-in properly. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of doing the fun stuff. They definitely need more breaking in, and the room needs more tweaking. My living room is a lot more reflective than the two apts. that I had the IIBs in, and the absorption vs. diffusion issue is still a bit befuddling.

I need to dig out my old copy of F. Alton Everest's Master Handbook of Acoustics to tune my head up. My last acoustics class was in college 35 years ago and I haven't been in a recording studio for at least 25 years.

I like the MMGs, but...it's still too early to tell. Still got about 5 weeks or so on the 60-day period. Buying a pair of 1.7s really will wreak havoc on the budget, but once the room acoustics are improved, I'll give it serious thought. There's a great Magnepan dealer nearby, Audio Connections, in Verona, NJ. The 12's are pretty similar to the MMGs. If they have a pair of them set up, I can do comparisons with the 1.7s without having to drag my MMGs over there, which would very difficult for me. I'm reluctant to run right over and hear the 1.7s right away, because they'll run rings around the MMGs and should, at 3 times the price.

BTW, if anyone wants my old IIBs as a rebuilding project, they can have them for next to nothing (but you'd have to pick them up). The thought of them getting tossed in a landfill is more than I can bear.


Edited to add: I've got a Cambridge Soundworks BassCube 12 subwoofer hooked up, crossed-over at 70hz, with the Maggies running full-range. It's not a particularly great subwoofer, and it's probably just polluting the bass, so it'll get disconnected shortly. One of the things I love most about Maggies is the quality of the bass: crisp, clean, and precise.
Edited by Metaphysician - 7/5/12 at 8:38am

Diffusion generally costs quite a bit more unless you are doing it yourself. Absorbers are cheap and easy to make if you want to go even cheaper but tend to "deaden" the sound more. I have a lot of absorbers in my small, formerly-live room. I would start with corner traps behind the speakers; like any dipole, the back wave tends to cause the most issues.

What is your primary listening position? I would move the chairs closer together and move the sofa away from the back wall and closer to the speakers. I suspect changing the listening position a little will make a fairly dramatic difference in the sound you hear.

HTH - Don

GIK has a relatively inexpensive diffuser.

Don, my primary listening position is nearfield. If you look at the diagram I posted above, you'll see two chairs (in blue) above and below the label "Liv.Rm." I move one of them so as to roughly form an equilateral triangle for listening. The sofa is totally unusable, sound-wise. It's very high-backed and totally deadens the sound. There's a 6' double window directly behind the sofa, which is covered at all times by a pleated shade.

I was unable to find my copy of Everest's Master Handbook of Acoustics although I think I was confusing it with his Acoustics Techniques for Home & Studio which preceded it. It's less comprehensive, but should give me what I need.

I found my old Audio Control Richter Scale, which has a warble tone generator and mic, supposed to be flat within ±1dB over it's 3 octave test range, which should be useful in analyzing bass problems. The odd shape of my open room layout doesn't exactly lend itself to easy computations of standing waves or anything else, unlike that proverbial acoustic nightmare, an 8x8x8 room. There are also a few system test disks from Stereophile and others, plus a Rat Shack Sound Level Meter.

I've got a feeling that the basic asymmetry of the room(s), compounded by that 10' bow window is going to make for some interesting acoustic anomalies. There are definitely some slap echo spots that need to get squelched.

Robert, thanks for suggesting GIK. I'm looking at their QRD Diffusors now.


BTW, before this, I was using a 5.1 speaker system with Linaeum tweeters. I don't know whether they'd be useful in creating a 7.1 system with the Maggies for movies or not. It's an interesting thought, or they might just send me out of the room screaming. First things first.
Edited by Metaphysician - 7/5/12 at 10:29pm

I have Everest and a few other books, including my old grad acoustics text (took the class for fun, never dreaming we'd start with high-order integral-differential wave equations, yuch!) You might check out the Real Traps site; Ethan has a number of articles.

I would consider absorbers behind the panels in the corners. That will kill a lot of the back wave, reducing bass and low/mid frequency cancellation plus help reduce comb filter effects (which probably come mainly from the back wall -- panels do not radiate much from the sides or top and bottom). it will also help reduce the impact of one side closed and the other open. Imaging will improve.

Update: The MMGs just weren't working out in the location flanking the TV (see diagram above). Using the Cardas Calculator, they needed to be 4.9 feet from the back wall. They sounded okay, but they were nearly a third of the way into the room, and the listening chair was another 5' away, which made the whole room a mess. The Living Room is almost totally open to the hallway and Dining Room. We enter it primarily from the opening on the left. If we flipped the entire LR setup left to right, it might work a little better. Of course, if I eliminated ALL the other furniture, it might work really well, but there would be a revolt in the house. Time to rethink.

What I did instead was put the Maggies in the center opening.



I corrected the drawing of the rooms a bit. In particular, the pillars were out of place, and a bumpout near the front door was missing. The center gap is 6'6" wide. The distance between the Maggies is 46" and the distance to the wall behind them is about 4'6". I've termporarily raised them 12" on boxes, which has made a world of diffference. The rug in front of them has improved their focus. Since they're close together, I tried them tweeters-out, but they sound more cohesive tweeters-in. On the hallway wall behind them (the green line) is a large 5-panel wooden oriental screen with a lot of carved soapstone on it. It seems to be acting as a bit of a diffuser, which is a happy coincidence. The hallway (and dining room) have wall-to-wall carpeting. I hear less smearing, which might be due to the carpeting.

This means I'll have two separate systems in the room: One for the Maggies (Carver amp, a (temporary) preamp, CD player) and one for the TV (5.1 speakers with Linaeum tweeters and BassCube 12 subwoofer, Panny receiver + misc. equip.)

Everyone was driven crazy (except my two parrots) after an hour or two by my trusty Sterophile test disks which, with the RS sound level meter, told me a lot. Main highlights: There's a major peak around 160hz, the bass response is great down to about 50 Hz where it drops like a stone, and my high frequency hearing at age 57 is about what you'd expect. Sigh....

I plan on using the Audio Control analyzer tomorrow to better characterize the low end response. An elevation of 6" should work better than 12", so probably I'll try them on some cement blocks. Once they're more stable, it'll be easier to test them at different angles of inclination, too.
Edited by Metaphysician - 7/9/12 at 1:55pm

Bass traps in the corners behnd them where they were would allow you to place them closer to the wall behind them, but if you like what you have, great! I don't have the stuff for two different systems now...

Greetings to all! Just wanted to add my 2 cents to the whole center channel discussion. It has always troubled me that the center channel speaker is the most important one for home theater, and yet we must accept horizonatally oriented, frequency compromised versions of floor-standers. Maggie's suggestion on their web site to use 2 center channels speakers (the MC1's are demonstrated) started me thinking that using 2 1.7's flanking my Pioneer Kuro, each fed with one half of a split pre amp center channel out, and each independently amped might be the ticket. They would need to be angled in about 30 degress (with appropriate expermentation). There are no horizontally oriented Maggies that image and go as low as the larger, vertical models. I am ready to purchase 3.7"s and want to try them in phantom mode first, but the literature on mutli-channel sound seems to require this discrete center channel, yet I see no reason why two couldn't together produce an optimum center channel. DTS Master Audio and Dolby True HD are high rez audio formats, and the Maggies should be able to optimize them. Another option would be a variation of the Tri-Center, which might produce even better results. Please let me know what you guys think about this...

Had a long post that I lost... Anybody else notice the new AVS seems much slower, especially when some ads load, than the old version? At times I have to sit and wait several seconds for the screen to respond back to my typing...

Shorter points:

1. A phantom center works fine and some folk prefer it rather than having a compromised center channel.

2. In my fairly small room my CC3 does just fine filling in between my old MG-IIIa's. What I wish it had was more bass, not a wider dispersion pattern. Mine is about ear height so sound stage is not an issue.

3. The few I have read who use the tri-center seem to like it but it strikes me as a scheme that would be very difficult to get right due to all the extra back (and front) waves. Comb filter effects galore.....It certainly take s a much bigger room than mine (mine is only about 13' across the front; the rooms I have viewed with tri-center are around 20' wide and up).

4. Using 1.7's has the same set-up issues as the tri-center but would provide better bass.

5. An interesting variation I have seen (not heard) is a pair of MC1's mounted horizontally above and below a screen. That would provide a large center sound stage with minimal interaction with the L/R mains.

Bottom line: I would try the phantom approach first. Properly set up with some room treatment they will provide a huge sound stage with a very precise image. After you see what it is like you can think more about a center scheme.

FWIWFM - Don

Thanks Don for your thoughts. Maggies separate sonic elements so well, a phantom center using 3.7' may be the way to go. How close do you think they'd need to be to the TV? My media room is about 28," long by 26" wide, so there's plenty of room and there are no spousal issues.

That's a huge room, at least to me! Wish I had that much space. OTOH, it would lead to lustful thoughts about 20.7's, and I have another kid to put through college so it's probably just as well mine is so small...

How close to the TV doesn't matter as much as distance apart and to the listening position (LP). I would start with the usual equilateral triangle: place them as far apart from each other as they are from your listening position. I usually toe them in slightly so they are not directly aimed at the LP but a little "out". Tweeters in or out is somewhat a personal decision and somewhat driven by distance and the room; try both ways and see which you prefer. I have run both ways in the past and am not sure I have a simple rule of thumb (it'd end up being wrong for you anyway). The farther away you are the less it matters, of course.

If you measure the straight-line (perpendicular) distance from LP to center of the screen, the distance to each speaker (and speakers to each other) should be 2/sqrt(3) = 1.155 times the straight line if I did my math rightly. Note Maggies, like any dipole, like to be away from the wall behind by at least 3' or so, and room treatment helps a lot. Be prepared to spend time dialing in their position over several days. It is exciting to see how much the sound can change with just a tiny little tweak. Also note Maggies take a little while to "break in" and the bass response will drop a little after some hours of listening.

HTH - Don

Thanks again for the input. I ordered my 3.7's today, but it's going to be at least a month before I can
pick them up. The good news is I have lots of tine to plan!

Has anyone gotten to hear the Mini maggie system meant for desk tops?

If so, are they meant only for quiet listening?
Can they be loud enough for watching movies in a room?

Thanks
Aloha

I have not heard them. The system includes a woofer panel, I believe. Loud enough depends upon the size of the room and how loud you like to listen, but they are desktop speakers not meant to fill a large volume. For that you may want the MMGs or 1.7's.