Magnepan MMG vs Polk Lsim or SDA ?

nhhiep

at $600/pair for MMG and 325 for MMGW seem like a super deal to give you that wide soundstage. anyone try it yet?

http://www.magnepan.com/model_MMG

falconcry72

Maggies, LSiM's, and SDA's... talk about three different sounding speakers! And I love them all!!!

nguyendot

MMGW don't give a wide soundstage... more like they beam it direct to you. Their sweet spot is about as wide as a thimble.

Dawgfish

I own all three, and like Falconcry72 said, I love them all. I don't find the sweet spot of the MMGs to be narrow, but they have to be properly placed. With Maggies they need to be pulled away from both the back and side walls at least around three feet'ish. If you don't have room to do that, you're better off going with something else. They are also not as versatile as either the SDAs or LSiMs with different types of music. They are first rate with small jazz groups, vocals, acoustic instruments, etc. They don't do as well with music involving larger groups, lots of dynamics, or with lots of bass (bass that is there is very well defined and accurate).

As all around speakers, it's hard to say witch is better between the LSiMs and the SDAs. Which SDAs has a large part to do with it. All things being equal, I would give the nod to the LSiMs over my SDA CRS's. I'd have to give a slight nod to my SDA SRS 2s over my 703s, but the SRS 2s are modded. They both have their strong points (pin-point imaging and separation with the LSiMs, wide soundstage and extreme bass slam with the SRS 2s) and are both extremely versatile sounding great with a variety of different music. I would have a really hard time choosing between the two. Fortunately, I don't have too! :-)

RamZet

Can you hang them on the wall like a painted canvas, or does it have to be off the wall?

wayne3burk

RamZet wrote: »

Can you hang them on the wall like a painted canvas, or does it have to be off the wall?

They are dipole speakers... They radiate both front and back and that's why they need 3+ feet from rear and / or side walls. So the short answer is if you suspend the from the ceiling you still need to suspend them 3 feet from the rear wall.

nooshinjohn

Having owned multiple Polk SDA's/SRS, Magepans, and heard the LSi/M's go head to head with them in several setups (my own and others), I would say that the Magies were the best imaging of the bunch, in that they present a huge soundstage, pinpoint imaging within that stage, and deliver the best acoustic/jazz performances have ever experienced from a loudspeaker. What they do lack is bass, but even that becomes negligible the further up the chain you go. A great subwoofer would put the MMG's in a class of their own, but better still would be to get a set of 1.6's. Placement is absolutely everything with these speakers, but once you find the zone, the smaller Maggies are easy to move back into position for listening. They are very good at HT, but that is absolutely not not their forte.

THE LSi/M is a very good speaker for just about any purpose, and for me, the sweet spot in the range is the 705's,. They are musical, image very well(not as wide or involving as the Maggies IMHO), but they do everything well.

I have come back to SDA-SRS 1.2TL's as my speaker of choice for many reasons. They are superb dual purpose speakers for HT and especially music. they are much more forgiving than the Maggies as far as placement, and modded, they image better than most any speaker I have heard at figures approaching 15k. The sound is something that must be experienced to be believed.

All of these speakers require vast amounts of high quality power to perform their best, and you cannot really go wrong with any of them. I will be building another Maggie rig someday, but for the performance, modded SDA still runs with the best of the best.

nooshinjohn

wayne3burk wrote: »

They are dipole speakers... They radiate both front and back and that's why they need 3+ feet from rear and / or side walls. So the short answer is if you suspend the from the ceiling you still need to suspend them 3 feet from the rear wall.

There are wall-mountable MMG's, and they sound pretty good actually.

nguyendot

nooshinjohn wrote: »

There are wall-mountable MMG's, and they sound pretty good actually.

Those are the MMGWs he speaks of. You are supposed to hang them on the wall - they're not supposed to be used away from it at all. You fold them in at whatever angle points to your seating position. The sweet spot on these particular ones is very very small. I owned them for a year and got rid of them as they were a pain to use. The sound once in the sweet spot was amazing. No bass though - they're simply too small to do anything lower than 100hz. You can recover them with acoustically transparent material so that when they are folded in they look like wall art.