HP's Workshop: Maggie 3.7 Speaker System--Part Two (TAS 213)

Magnepan MG3.7--part two, VPI Classic Three, HP's Ten Most Significant Amps

Part One was published in the last issue (212), and I should have labeled it a sneak preview since the Maggies had arrived in Sea Cliff just after their showing in Las Vegas, and just as my deadline was about to fall due. And so most of my listening was done with CDs, including several Golden Ear winners in Editor’s Choice. However, then, after some quite quick listens to analog material, I knew the speaker was capable of much, much more. And so, Part Two.

The Maggie 3.7s are the best speaker system that Magnepan has produced in years, and of such excellence that they foreshadow future and more impressive designs from the company. Their arrival shows that the company, seemingly having lost its way for almost a decade, has found again its old fire and sense of purpose.

Yes, I am suggesting there is a larger and more revelatory design in its future, and, aside from some not-so-subtle hints, no one at the company will out-and-out confirm this speculation. For as good as the 3.7s are, and they are breathtakingly so, there is more to be done.

For one thing, the new Maggies do not plumb the very most depths of the bottom octave, though they are so cannily balanced you won’t ordinarily miss the shuddering response of organ pedal points or massive bass drum whacks (or synthesizer pulses). The 3.7s go down, with careful setup, just maybe, to circa 40Hz, with a gentle roll-off that allows some of the harmonics of the basement frequencies to be audible further up.

From the midbass (which I define as 40 to 80Hz) upward, the response is seamless, continuous, and extended into what some would call the heavenly region.

You won’t hear a trace of any crossovers from the true ribbon tweeter at the top (on which Magnepan holds a patent) to its new quasi-ribbon midrange and quasi-ribbon low-frequency drivers. And, at the outset, you won’t be listening for such arcanities, so convincing is the coherency and continuousness of the system. Indeed, with the best playback material, especially analog, there is an “aliveness,” even a sort of electricity in the presentation of individual images upon the soundstage that can and does create an illusion of the real thing I’ve not heard from any Magnepan speaker before, or, for that matter, almost any speaker system. So convincing is the 3.7 in its almost “living presence” that you won’t miss those last few bottom-end frequencies.

The other things you’ll note immediately is the size of the soundfield that these (relatively) modest-sized speakers project. The ambient space itself is huge (as in life) and envelops the distance behind the speakers (dipoles), but, unlike earlier Maggies, the images within that field are anything but “huge.” Indeed, they are proportionate to the way you would hear them in concert (or in relation to the way the recording itself has been miked). Stir in, metaphorically speaking, the real-world attack and decay these ribbons and quasi-ribbons delineate, i.e., the “presence,” and the distance between you and a sense of the real thing is reduced in a way it simply isn’t with other reproducers. It has, in the words of a talented listener who sat in for a long session with me, “not only amazing dynamic abilities, but offers a coherence in timing, the arrival of all the frequencies in the proper relative time frame.” The gradations and shading of dynamics, from the micro to the macro, is one of the speaker’s greatest achievements, and this, I believe, is a function of the exceptional rendering of transients, both in attack and decay.

Now, obviously, you aren’t going to get such results if you do not use the best recordings and the associated equipment capable of sustaining dynamics on transients and the power to cleanly enforce and back up those transients. In the first sessions with the 3.7s, I used a CD player that, unbeknownst to me at first blush, compressed dynamics, but did other things admirably, including an almost spooky rendering of the depth and dimensional aspects within the ambient space (vide, the Regent recording—available through Albany Records—of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols, recorded in the Worcester Cathedral). It took the insertion of the EMM Labs XD player to restore the dynamics to realistic proportions. However, at the cost of the dimensionality and ambient retrieval I made note of in the first part of this essay. Even with the enhanced CD dynamics, analog recordings had even more dynamic life and “presence (thanks, I believe, to the Veloce battery-operated line and phonostages, whose real forte—forgive the intended pun—is an extended range of dynamic capability). Which brings me around to an obvious point: Anything your associated equipment does wrong or inadequately you are going to hear through these Maggies, and so, in these sessions, clarity and neutrality of character and purity of tone were the first things I aimed to achieve. I don’t think I have yet succeeded in realizing the 3.7s’ capabilities in this regard. For example, at the very last moment before this particular deadline, the Nordost Tyr interconnects gave way to a Furutech system, which I haven’t had time to evaluate, but which is at least as good as the Nordost, and maybe even better.