nightflier
03-02-2010, 01:02 PM
There isn't much about this online and I've spent countless hours tweaking things in my HT room to improve the sound on these. Here's some things I've discovered:
Wall height is key:
You wouldn't think it, but just like their floor-standing brethren, the MC1s are designed to sound their best when your ears are just above the middle-height of the tweeter panels. With wall-hanging speakers that seems odd, because most other manufacturers and showrooms will have wall-hanging speakers hanging over-head. These need to hang very low if you want them to be at ear-height when sitting on a couch or recliner.
The tweeters on the MC1s are 34" tall, but they are also higher up with extra sapce near the bottom, so the 17" (half of 34") up the tweeter is actually more than half-way up the panel. That mid-point needs to be at ear-height, and on my wall, the speakers are now hanging lower than the TV - not exactly the best looking placement, but it helps
An adjustment of just an inch makes a huge difference:
I didn't want to put my panels too near the floor, so I opted for a slight tilt. I found that to aim the tweeter's mid-height at my ears, I needed to add a tilt of about 3/4". While that may seem very little, over the distance from my speakers to my seat, that made a much larger difference (a little high-school trig was useful here). I used custom drilled wood blocks, but that introduced other problems (see below). The sound stage is now perfectly aligned to the place of my ears when I'm reclined in my lazy-boy.
Panel bracing:
Larger Magnepans benefit considerably from better bracing along their height (my MG12s sure did), and this is most noticeable in offering up tighter bass. But when they're hanging on a wall and need to swing in & out, that's not really possible. Fortunately, there is no bass below 80Hz, so the problem is not as severe. I did use rubber cement on the parts of the hinges that attach to the wall, and while I can't say this for sure, I think it helped. Then again, considering my other gerry-rigging (see below), that's probably just in my head.
I've heard that some people add wood sides to the panels to add aditio9nal bracing, but that makes them heavier and thus negates the convenient hang-on-the-wall mobility, so I decided against that.
Falling forward:
Because my panels are now tilted forward by 3/4" they are also sometimes falling out from the angle I had them set at. Magnepan suggests using rubber washers at the top to reduce this, but I still find that they sometimes move on their own. They sell special axle-bolts too, but they're not inexpensive and for now the rubber works OK.
Location:
According to Magnepan, they do better when mounted on side walls (just like the florr-standers, they want lots of open room around them). Well that wasn't an option for me as that would obstruct walkers by. I wanted them next to the TV. Bad idea, there too. They actually do much better when spaced further apart than your standard TV-side mounted speakers. They throw a huge sound stage, so why restrict that? Mount them as far out as humanly possible without getting too close to the side walls that they are constrained by them. Unfortunately, in my case, I don't have a bigger room so I had to compromise, but that certainly narrowed the sound stage noticeably.
Center channel sound:
Magnepan makes a number of curved center channels. If you have the room, avoid them. First of all, they don't have any meaningful bass (mine goes down to just 100Hz). The much better option is to have two speakers combine to provide the center channel mounted right next to the TV, preferably models that are identical to the ones on the left & right. The effect is truly magical: the sound comes from the center of the TV screen, almost as if a speaker was behind the a perforated screen.
I wired my MC1s in sequence to emulate this, and the effect was just as advertised. Unfortunately, my room is tiny, so I have to use a curved center channel. It sits below the TV, tilted upwards and is OK, but not at all like having two speakers wired as a single center. If you have the larger room, the cost of two MC1s is hardly more than many center channel speakers, but the sound quality is much better (no narrow MTM dispersion issues). Actually, a pair of MG-Ws would only set you back $300, and would also blow away any center channel priced 2-3 times as much.
Rear speakers:
Everything I mentioned about the front speaker directionality applies to these as well. Unlike box speakers, you just can't mount them above your ears. In my room that was a bit of a problem because that is where people walk to get to the seats and because the back-leaning seats could bang up against them. I have no solution so they are currently mounted too high, but I got an email from someone who did mount them on the ceiling and so I'll share what he said (kind of a funny story, really):
"I ceiling-mounted them but no amount of rubber washers could keep them at the right angle so I used string. Again, not ideal, but it works. By the way, Magnepan sells better locking axle-bolts that don't fall out from a little rattling (yes, been there, done that and nearly had one fall on my head).
Also make sure you screw the hanging brackets into studs and not just the drywall. When they hang horizontally, the weight on the hinges is very different from when they are mounted in the vertical position. That was actually what happened when the speaker fell: the hinge (which only has one screw, BTW) had swung out and the speaker slipped off. This was also due to the additional washers I was trying to insert. Fortunately the speaker wire held it up. One suggestion Magnepan had was to use a pre-drilled rails between the brackets to keep anything from slipping and to be able to add extra screws, but that would have been even more unattractive and added more holes to my ceiling."
Room padding & reflection:
Magnepans are bi-polar, so they have equal sound coming out the front as the back (well almost equal). I experimented with various forms of home-made wall padding, but it didn't improve things much. I now have them radiating right off the back wall and that seems to sound best. The slight angle I added did diffuse this somewhat, but it was a trade-off I'll have to learn to live with.
The exception was with the side walls. my system is not exactly centered in the room so one wall is closer than the other. This took a lot of tweaking (I even tried to create a thick wall-hanging reflective platform to compensate, but it was ugly and realy stood out into the living space. I think I found a combination of differently absorbing materials (thank god for Joann's) to hang on both walls, but I'm still experimenting there.
**************************
Well anyhow, I thought I would share my experiences on this as there doesn't seem to be much info about it online. Considering the performance, these speakers are such a bargain (I bought all of mine second hand), that I really hope that setup isn't going to be where people are turned off by them. Properly set up, a Magnepan system competes with much more expensive systems. I hope it's of some use to others.
Wall height is key:
You wouldn't think it, but just like their floor-standing brethren, the MC1s are designed to sound their best when your ears are just above the middle-height of the tweeter panels. With wall-hanging speakers that seems odd, because most other manufacturers and showrooms will have wall-hanging speakers hanging over-head. These need to hang very low if you want them to be at ear-height when sitting on a couch or recliner.
The tweeters on the MC1s are 34" tall, but they are also higher up with extra sapce near the bottom, so the 17" (half of 34") up the tweeter is actually more than half-way up the panel. That mid-point needs to be at ear-height, and on my wall, the speakers are now hanging lower than the TV - not exactly the best looking placement, but it helps
An adjustment of just an inch makes a huge difference:
I didn't want to put my panels too near the floor, so I opted for a slight tilt. I found that to aim the tweeter's mid-height at my ears, I needed to add a tilt of about 3/4". While that may seem very little, over the distance from my speakers to my seat, that made a much larger difference (a little high-school trig was useful here). I used custom drilled wood blocks, but that introduced other problems (see below). The sound stage is now perfectly aligned to the place of my ears when I'm reclined in my lazy-boy.
Panel bracing:
Larger Magnepans benefit considerably from better bracing along their height (my MG12s sure did), and this is most noticeable in offering up tighter bass. But when they're hanging on a wall and need to swing in & out, that's not really possible. Fortunately, there is no bass below 80Hz, so the problem is not as severe. I did use rubber cement on the parts of the hinges that attach to the wall, and while I can't say this for sure, I think it helped. Then again, considering my other gerry-rigging (see below), that's probably just in my head.
I've heard that some people add wood sides to the panels to add aditio9nal bracing, but that makes them heavier and thus negates the convenient hang-on-the-wall mobility, so I decided against that.
Falling forward:
Because my panels are now tilted forward by 3/4" they are also sometimes falling out from the angle I had them set at. Magnepan suggests using rubber washers at the top to reduce this, but I still find that they sometimes move on their own. They sell special axle-bolts too, but they're not inexpensive and for now the rubber works OK.
Location:
According to Magnepan, they do better when mounted on side walls (just like the florr-standers, they want lots of open room around them). Well that wasn't an option for me as that would obstruct walkers by. I wanted them next to the TV. Bad idea, there too. They actually do much better when spaced further apart than your standard TV-side mounted speakers. They throw a huge sound stage, so why restrict that? Mount them as far out as humanly possible without getting too close to the side walls that they are constrained by them. Unfortunately, in my case, I don't have a bigger room so I had to compromise, but that certainly narrowed the sound stage noticeably.
Center channel sound:
Magnepan makes a number of curved center channels. If you have the room, avoid them. First of all, they don't have any meaningful bass (mine goes down to just 100Hz). The much better option is to have two speakers combine to provide the center channel mounted right next to the TV, preferably models that are identical to the ones on the left & right. The effect is truly magical: the sound comes from the center of the TV screen, almost as if a speaker was behind the a perforated screen.
I wired my MC1s in sequence to emulate this, and the effect was just as advertised. Unfortunately, my room is tiny, so I have to use a curved center channel. It sits below the TV, tilted upwards and is OK, but not at all like having two speakers wired as a single center. If you have the larger room, the cost of two MC1s is hardly more than many center channel speakers, but the sound quality is much better (no narrow MTM dispersion issues). Actually, a pair of MG-Ws would only set you back $300, and would also blow away any center channel priced 2-3 times as much.
Rear speakers:
Everything I mentioned about the front speaker directionality applies to these as well. Unlike box speakers, you just can't mount them above your ears. In my room that was a bit of a problem because that is where people walk to get to the seats and because the back-leaning seats could bang up against them. I have no solution so they are currently mounted too high, but I got an email from someone who did mount them on the ceiling and so I'll share what he said (kind of a funny story, really):
"I ceiling-mounted them but no amount of rubber washers could keep them at the right angle so I used string. Again, not ideal, but it works. By the way, Magnepan sells better locking axle-bolts that don't fall out from a little rattling (yes, been there, done that and nearly had one fall on my head).
Also make sure you screw the hanging brackets into studs and not just the drywall. When they hang horizontally, the weight on the hinges is very different from when they are mounted in the vertical position. That was actually what happened when the speaker fell: the hinge (which only has one screw, BTW) had swung out and the speaker slipped off. This was also due to the additional washers I was trying to insert. Fortunately the speaker wire held it up. One suggestion Magnepan had was to use a pre-drilled rails between the brackets to keep anything from slipping and to be able to add extra screws, but that would have been even more unattractive and added more holes to my ceiling."
Room padding & reflection:
Magnepans are bi-polar, so they have equal sound coming out the front as the back (well almost equal). I experimented with various forms of home-made wall padding, but it didn't improve things much. I now have them radiating right off the back wall and that seems to sound best. The slight angle I added did diffuse this somewhat, but it was a trade-off I'll have to learn to live with.
The exception was with the side walls. my system is not exactly centered in the room so one wall is closer than the other. This took a lot of tweaking (I even tried to create a thick wall-hanging reflective platform to compensate, but it was ugly and realy stood out into the living space. I think I found a combination of differently absorbing materials (thank god for Joann's) to hang on both walls, but I'm still experimenting there.
**************************
Well anyhow, I thought I would share my experiences on this as there doesn't seem to be much info about it online. Considering the performance, these speakers are such a bargain (I bought all of mine second hand), that I really hope that setup isn't going to be where people are turned off by them. Properly set up, a Magnepan system competes with much more expensive systems. I hope it's of some use to others.