Good overview of your listenings. Surprise, surprise, you decided to upgrade!

Your impressions of the Magneplanars were pretty similar to my listenings with their 1.6 and 3.6 models. I thought they had more low end kick than a lot of other panel speakers I've heard, but they're at their best primarily with acoustic music. They very effectively disappear and image well when positioned properly (pulling them at least 3' from the front wall is a must; no idea if this also applies to the MMG and their newer wall-mounted models). But, they have a narrow dispersion pattern and their tonal characteristics change a lot when you move around the room.

Interesting about contrasting the B&W to the ANs. Not sure what type of sound I would prefer. I have heard the N805s before and thought they were excellent all-arounders, but I could only compare them with other B&W models, so I have no idea how they would stack up in A/B sessions with competing model lines.

But, when espousing the virtues of the ANs, I wouldn't go too far with trying to generalize the design approaches. Saying that the driver movement was minimal is not always considered a positive, since one of the more commonly cited design goals with subwoofer drivers is a high Xmax (maximum linear excursion).

And the whole notion of a resonant wood box being a positive trait, I just don't buy it. I've heard way too many speakers over the years with poorly damped cabinets and the resulting resonance to believe that all of the companies that devote time and expense to minimize box resonances are wasting their time. Even though a guitar, piano, and violin are all hollow bodied instruments, they each have a VERY different sonic signature. Even though a violin sounds great with a bow or a pluck, I certainly wouldn't want percussion instruments to sound like they were pumped through a violin body. Are you saying that in order to best reproduce a violin sound, then a speaker driver should be mounted inside a hollow cavity that mimics the resonant characteristics of a violin? Or if you want to optimize a human voice reproduction, then a speaker designer should use a ribbon transducer and mount it inside a fleshy pipe?

This kind of generalized analogy runs dangerously close to the Bose 901 edict that says that if you want to best reproduce a concert hall type of sound, then you must design speakers that have similar reflective characteristics. If the recording was done in a concert hall, then that ambient effect is already part of the recording. Last thing you want is for the speaker to further add to that reverberant effect. Same thing goes with wooden speaker boxes. A violin is played through a reverberant wood body, and that effect is already part of the recording. Why would you want to put the sound through yet another resonant body if the end goal is to reproduce the sound as closely to what you would actually hear in person?