20.7 owners?....UPDATE?
 

:D Ok, enough's enough, all of you new 20.7 owners, :bowdown: sitting there listening with big grins-on-faces, for hours upon hours ......really need to stop for just a few minutes and throw poor pitiful me a bone! :homer2:

I've become a drooling 6 year old on Christmas Eve :drool:, but in this case Christmas eve is 2 months long. :tears::tears:

Hi Ray,

My 3.7's and Sub1's arrived today so I now have all my 5.2 McMaggie system components in hand. I "just" have to get them all connected up and then the fun will begin. :music:
I promise to have high resolution photos posted on this thread sometime this weekend. :yes:
The Sub1's are very heavy but the one thing that my back immediately noticed is that the 3.7's are way lighter than the 20.7's. The light cherry Sub1's look great beside the dark cherry Maggie's.
I have a few extra mystery goodies in my system which will be present in the photos. I will be keen to see if anyone can spot and identify them. :scratch2:

All the best, Ian

I'd read somewhere that the 20.7s are way heavier than the 3.7s. I guess the push-pull magnet setup would be a big factor.

no doubt will be a fantastic setup, and the tweaking will be at least part of the fun!

I'll be on the lookout for the mystery items! :scratch2:

Thanks Ian! :yes:

Don't you worry Ray, you will be rockin out in no time. :yes: Then you can look at us poor 3.7 suckers and say, "You boys don't know what you are missing". Personally I want to keep it that way but I sure am happy for the 20.7 owners. :D

So Ian, lay it on us! :music:

~Mike

Patience Grasshopper ;)

Ray,

It will be worth the wait. I know it can be VERY tough, but hang in there :hug: you've got us.

Thanks guys for the chuckle this morning! :D:D

I've come to my senses (well just a little) since I'd made the original post.
It was a bit of a slow week this past week, so that didn't help.

'it's still fun to act like a kid now and then, heck, when it's not, ya might as well just listen to AM radio. :yes:

:eek:

Ray, just give a couple of very early impressions... they still have less than 50hrs up atm.

The frames are much deeper on the 3.7s contributing to their mass which gives them quite a head start over the 3.7s. Even off sound anchors they are considerably more focussed.

If you have your 3.7s singing well atm then I doubt there'll be too many problems with 20.7s. I put mine up on to Sound Anchor stands today and that started to overload the room a bit so just pulled them in a touch and all is fine again. The stands are a bit like swapping out to a track suspension, there is a bit more comfort in the standard stands but I haven't hit any bumps yet.

I just put a Shunyata Cyclops into the system this afternoon and that really pulled the music right back into it's skin. They are sounding very beautiful and very real.

My greatest worry was that in moving to the bigger speaker I might lose some of the coherence and agility of the 3.7s, truth is it goes a good step up in terms of both. Somehow the midrange is even better again. There is no area in which they haven't improved on the 3.7 (sorry guys) which is mindblowing given they are just a week old. Don't know how good they can get but the next couple of months are certainly sounding sweet.

Working out at something more than $10K for an additional 10khz these are amongst the best k's I've spent in a long time. It's so much more than a bit of extra bass, it's like the foundations of the architecture of the music just got so much stronger and deeper as well... the bass fundamentals give the whole system a far greater potential.

Good luck with the set-up Ian, you've got it ahead of you and really look forward to hearing how it goes.

The coherence was my biggest single worry also on the 20.7s! I almost convinced myself that the 20.7s couldn't possibly be as good in this regard.

I was worried I'd have the 20.7s, which no doubt would be better in most areas at the expense of that magical coherence of the 3.7s. I'm absolutely thrilled to see your comment relating to this!!!:banana::banana::banana::banana::D:D:D ...ok Ray, enough already with the emoticons!

I've got the 3.7s dialed in position wise now, nice wide and deep soundstage, great focus in the center with mono recordings. I'll start off with the 20.7s in the same position and work from there.

speaking of Magnepan positioning....

There's an old CD, Roger Waters, Amused to Death. Recorded with what many might suggest would be "Q-Sound gone wild."

I've found that the better the overall position of the 3.7s are, the more dramatic the Q-Sound effect becomes. The recording is full of sounds that emanate from the left or right wall, well out in front of the speakers. In some cases you'd swear the sound is coming directly from over your right or left shoulder. As the overall positioning of the 3.7s. or room problems, get "worse" the Q-sound effects move forward along the wall and become much closer to the speakers. This CD (long since ripped to NAS of course :D) has become somewhat of a test CD for me.

A couple of weeks down the track living with the 20.7s (they do take up a fair part of the house so we are living with them) and now with about 150hrs up the constant joyfully shocked and bewildered expression on my face has subsided into just a content permanent grin.

The beloved behemoths are settling in and even at their most bad hair moments they are still extraordinary.

I thought about Jonathon Valin's review and how it was done with the stock 1 ohm resistor on the tweeter and the stock bridge on the mids without even a good set of stands.

If he loved them like that he would not believe how good they sound on a decent set of feet and running them naked with a transparent set of jumpers instead of the stock bridges or resistors.

When I put the Shunyata Cyclops in I could hear exactly how grungy the stock bridges are compared to the Empirical Design jumpers. Still not a hint of glare or hardness throughout the range since day 1.

My 76 year old mum came over for dinner tonight, she doesn't know much about hifi but she does know good music when she hears it.

The expression on her face when I cued up a hi-res studio master of Dame Janet Baker singing the Sea Slumber song from Elgar's Sea Pictures was priceless... there was Dame Janet beautifully before us in the room her voice just soaring, and when Barbirolli swelled the orchestra the strings completely filled the air with resin and bloom, the LSO in full scale right across the room and stretched back in rows somewhere into the distance.

Only 150hrs up... I didn't even have to say the speakers are just burning in... just no excuses needed.

Mum is a bit fond of Nora Jones so on went some 24/192 Feels like me and she looked at me and asked is that much bass normal. I smiled. She said she really liked how you could see where every instrument in the band was and just how good Nora could sing... the room was just alive with resonance. When I put on Wispelwey and Lazic and the Brahms cello sonata we both agreed that the piano sounded just like a real Steinway and that cellos do sound that deep, and that you could just about see both and no, that the bass level was indeed quite normal just not what was expected.

When on went Third Round - Manu Katche, brilliant jazz drummer and percussionist, the high hats where just shimmering across the room with the irresistible rhythm and all the feet where tapping, then later with one of Naim's best recordings, a 24/192 of Antonio Forcione & Sabina Sciubba's Meet me in London... and when Sabina sang Caruso my mum finally stopped looking surprised and just gave in and fair fell into the music.

These are genuinely a music lovers dream, the speakers of a lifetime, and the panels haven't even really started to free up yet.