Speaker Characteristics and Why?

[E-Stat]

The only problem is that JA is guessing - they have never sounded good in room to me...They measured the speakers and they're some of the worst in existence.

I'm glad that we agree that the admittedly faulty measurements are useless.

My issue is with spending a great deal of time to measure a speaker when you KNOW at the outset that whatever the result will reflect very little back to how they sound in room. JA says this for heaven sake.

Once again we agree. He says that measuring ALL large planars is flawed using his methodology and gear.

And the speakers need to be set-up according to manufacturer recommendation. That magazine doesn't do that with any sort of consistency at all.

That is certainly possible!

My dealer has the 1.6 maggies and several other people just browsing all commented "bright and thin". They got up and left.

That is not at all the experience I had just last week when I heard them in Salt Lake City.

Everyone I know who has them or used to own them complain all the time about getting them to work in room.

Please illustrate with facts. That does not appear to be the case with the majority of users over at MUG.

And of all the demo rooms at Soundhounds the room with the 1.7 had a cd player that you could not open and put a new one in. As Terry noted - with Magnepan they like to control the music that gets played (read between the lines - if you play anything hard they'll never sell).

I heard them with a McIntosh player. Is that what you were forced to listen to?

You have not illustrated that you understand measurements - all you have done is post what someone else, Linkwitz, says and that he basically said what JA said - the measurements are not representative of the loudspeaker - but he has provided no actual measurements himself.

A smart engineer acknowledges when a test procedure lacks relevance to the real world.

He has not said that the speaker in room will be dead flat from 20hz - 20khz with zero distortion perfect phase and polar response - all he has talked about is the various problems associated with JA's measuring of the speaker. Umm got it. JA said the same thing.

What JA said was that he was NOT able to provide in room measurements and from the outset, the underlying assumption of his speaker test does NOT apply to large planars. He acknowledges the limitations of his own testing. I applaud his honesty.

I suppose I demand some actual evidence that these speakers are the bee's knees of accuracy.

As with all speakers, they are imperfect but not to the degree the predisposed erroneous test seems to suggest. You'll have to expand beyond the Julian Hirsch thing.

rw