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61
S
crambling around to find
out what I had said about
the original ve rsion of
M ag n ep a n’s MG-20, I
was a bit startled to learn
that this top-of-the-line Maggie was
introduced a decade ago. Ten years
is an audio lifetime between model
improvements, and while the Point
One was shown at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas two
years ago, it is just now making its
way to the marketplace. It seemed
o bvious that designer Jim Wi n ey
wanted to produce something special
and to make a statement.
After reading my cap s u l i ze d
review [Issue 83/84], I wanted to
kick myself. It might not have been
such a bad thing if I had, as I said I
would do, c o n t i nued with an in-
depth follow-up. But I never did.
Bad, bad boy, you HP you.
The one thing that made it diffi-
cult for me to come to grips with the
original 20 was the way its bass pan-
els would “flap” if jolted with a
s h a rp low - f re q u e n cy tra n s i e n t .
Organ pedal-points it could handle,
and handle to several frequencies
below the 32 mark,but a whack on a
bass drum or some such would lead
to the grossest “mistracking.”
And it isn’t that I didn’t want to
keep these Maggies as a reference.
There was not, at that time, another
speaker on the market—that I had
heard—lower in overall tonal col-
oration, from top to bottom of the
spectrum. They sounded more natu-
ral than anything else in my listening
ex p e r i e n c e. And that lege n d a ry
Winey-designed ribbon tweeter lent
the top half of the soundfield a
transparency (in the real sense of
t h at wo rd , wh i ch is a Zen-like
absence of things between you and
the music) unduplicated by any other
h i g h - f re q u e n cy rep roducer in the
audio world of 1992.
These things I said then.
What I should have gone on to
discuss were other aspects of the
speaker—a three-way system—that
were more troublesome and chal-
l e n g i n g, s h o rtcomings that wo u l d
point the way for future improve-
ments. To wit:
Th e re we re discontinu i t i e s
b e t ween its three drive rs. For a
design of its day, these would have
been considered quite minor. But we
have all learned better since then,
thanks to mu ch - i m p roved speake r
designs. In retrospect, the disconti-
nuities and cohere n cy pro bl e m s k i
can be more easily analyzed.
Matching the speed of response
and the purity of that ribbon tweeter
would be no easy task for its then sin-
gle-ended midrange planar design
(not a true “ribbon”). And arresting-
ly enough, m at ching that singl e -
ended midra n ge to the push-pull
design of the speaker’s bass panels
was almost as challenging, less so in
sonic terms than in dynamic ones.
Brief sermonette: I’ve argued in
an essay on dynamics that, meta-
phorically, we must, if audio design
is to advance, separate the frequency
domain from that of time, particu-
larly time as seen through the lens of
dynamics. Early Magnepan designs,
p a rt i c u l a rly the top-end Ty m p a n i
series that Wi n e y designed fo r
Audio Re s e a rch , we re limited in
both senses, but actually more in the
resolution of dy n a m i c s. Th e s e
s p e a ke rs could play loudly (and in
point of a u ral fa c t , t h ey sounded
their best only when played we l l
ab ove an equivalent concert - h a l l
l eve l ) , but we re dy n a m i c a l ly dead
during softer passage s.
In the original MG-20, t h e
dynamic response of the three driv-
ers was different, with the tweeter
being not only “faster” but able to
resolve dynamics into the mezzo-
Magnepan MG-20.1 Loudspeaker
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