Two year Magnepan 20.7 ownership anniversary passes

[Beet Farmer]

Last week I note on my phone calendar the two year anniversary of owning my Magnepan 20.7 Speakers.
I cannot believe it has been two years. Time flies when you enjoy something so much.

I can say it took eight months for them to 'break in'
(one reason may have been I never blasted them, or played them loud. Always just a moderate level.)
The main problem of not broken in was a lack of low level detail at... lower levels. Seemed like the low level details just vanished when playing at less than moderately louder levels.
I was pretty sure this was due to not broken in. So I did not worry. and yes I was correct. Jut it did take a lot longer than I ever thought it would.

Changing the midrange resistors was very helpful for clarity. And I learned a fact that the mirange resistors alter the TONE of the midrange (as their real purpose) lower resistance (or no resistor at all) raises the tone average, and a larger resistor lowers the main tone This all in a very smal lrange between zero and three Ohms. After a lot of experimenting with less expensive resistors, and then narrowing it down with Duelund CAST and later Path Audio resistors. I came to a final (for MY speakers in My roomand MY listening) of three parallel resistors for a total of a 1.3 Ohms resistance made up of two Path Audio 3.9 Ohm and one Duelund CAST 3.9 ohm. (A side note about the Duelund. the leads are VERY fragile silver, and work harden rapidly (bending them back and forth a few times) and BREAK OFF way too easily. I made a carrier out of a wood dowel (this also allowed me to wrap the lead wire as a coil of about 8 turns which further smoothed the sound a tiny bit) to hold the Duelund (and the other two together_ so the Duelund leads do not get stressed. I lost two of them.. just to mention, the leads break off right at the place the exit the resistor, so leaving the resistor useless)

And the final thing on the speakers was the placement of exotic wood under the OEM oval base. I tried different woods and the final choice was 1.5" square by 6"and 12" and 18" long spindles of Bloodwood. (arranged like the shape of the oval though the middles ones angled a lot A total of 2x the 6: 4 times the 12 : and 2 of the 18: under each base.This last just brought out a lovely tone particularly natural sounding lower mids due to the wood under the speaker.
One oddity was when the wood had sunk into the carpet after a day, the tone was lost. I had to place small dominoes sized bits under the ends of all the Bloodwood to keep them from sinking into and thus being muffled.. This was a good solution, as I have had the Bloodwood under the speakers for many months and am very happy.

One final result has been my audio magazines have sat unread... I just have no interest in chasing anything ANYTHING any more (at least for the foreseeable future. LOL)