"Kudos to Magnepan for delivering the MMGi into a market rife with upward-spiraling costs and offering an impossibly high-value product in the process."
Magnepan has been an iconic brand in high-end audio since its launch in 1969 by then-3M engineer James Winey. The company’s first speaker, the Tympani I, was marketed and distributed by fellow Minnesota manufacturer Audio Research. Resembling a three-panel hinged room divider, that speaker, through various incarnations, developed a devoted following and became a high-end legend. Five years later, following Magnepan’s break with Audio Research, the company located its then largely expanded operations in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, where it has remained for over 40 years. Jim Winey’s son, Mark, now runs the company, and to this day, all Magnepan products are manufactured entirely in the United States. Extreme skill is required in the speaker’s assembly, a task assigned to teams of highly accomplished technicians who oversee the process from start to finish. Jim Winey’s innovative approach to loudspeaker design challenged the status quo and continues to draw followers and "Best of Show" awards. By dispensing with conventional cone drivers and enclosures, a diaphragm of super-thin Mylar, suspended within an array of permanent magnets, is used to handle the midrange and bass. Unlike more conventional cones and drivers, that Mylar diaphragm, when excited within a magnetic field, is all that moves to create sound. The dispersion of the magnets over the entire Mylar panel ensures the uniformity of that sound. The planar-magnetic driver is complimented by a quasi-ribbon tweeter (or pure ribbon for the upper-end models). The MMGi, which Magnepan says represents the speaker’s "first sonic upgrade" in over 12 years (although Magnepan is mute on just what that upgrade is) is a two-way design with an impedance of 4 ohms and a sensitivity of 86dB. It uses a roughly 39" x 9" driver for bass and midrange frequencies, along with a 39" x 2" quasi-ribbon tweeter. The MMGi is unique among Magnepan speakers because it is sold both factory-direct and through participating dealers. The rationale for this is novel and makes some sense. Magnepan believes that getting any of their speakers into audiophiles' systems will lead to future sales of larger models, so the company sells the MMGi's for the lowest possible price in order to facilitate this. Two choices of finish are available: black oak trim with black fabric or natural oak trim and off-white fabric. The review pair was the latter and looked stunning. All that was missing was a pair of white cotton gloves to protect the elegant fabric from smudges. Along with a thorough and well-written instruction manual, warranty card and thank-you letter are a 5/64th" ball-end Allen wrench, pairs of 1- and 2-ohm ceramic resistors (used to attenuate tweeter levels by -1dB or -4dB, respectively) and spare 4-amp fuses. A pair of self-adhesive logo tags for the front of the panels completes the package. With a shipping weight of only 40 pounds, a pair MMGi's won’t require recruitment of a friend to help unpack and position them in your listening room. Magnepan is clear in their literature as to the type of amplifier to use with their speakers: direct-coupled, class-A/B, high-current designs. Even though I did not have other amplifiers on hand to try with the MMGi's, I felt the Emerald Physics 100.2 SE, delivering 150 watts into 4 ohms, handled the load quite well. Being dipolar radiators, the MMGi's, like all Magnepan speakers, necessitate ample space behind them because in-phase sound is radiated from both the front and back. I positioned the speakers 36" from the front wall, 20" from the side walls, five feet apart and seven feet from my listening seat. Heeding my experience with my SMGa's, I let the flippers drop, so the speakers sat without tilt. In my small room, this seemed to give a more direct, immediate sound.The MMGi's are mirror-imaged; the left speaker has a "-1" suffix after the serial number, the right speaker a "-2." When the speakers are placed according to the manufacturer’s instructions, the tweeters are to the outside edge of each panel. To experiment with imaging, coherence and focus, you can also place the tweeters on the inside. I tried this and found it resulted in a subtle increase in the presence and coherence of the highs and a slight increase in the size, focus and dimensionality of the soundstage, in some instances the sound extending well beyond the speakers’ outer edges. My smallish listening room may have contributed to this effect, so experimentation is definitely in order. In terms of toe-in, the speakers were aimed so the tweeters crossed just behind my head. After about 75 hours of burn-in, I felt the speakers were ready for some serious listening.
ne of the first LPs I cued up was a Record Store Day purchase from 2015: the reissue of Junior Wells’ 1966 release It’s My Life Baby [Vanguard VSD-79231]. A couple of tracks were recorded live in the South Side blues institution Pepper’s Lounge, and they are stunning. In uncluttered sound, they capture the club’s ambience perfectly, and put me up front, close to the action on the bandstand. The MMGi's acquitted themselves beautifully, rendering the scene as well as I can remember hearing it. The magic of the Maggies -- their uncanny ability to get out of the way of the music -- revealed itself right off the bat, and as my listening continued, I became increasingly involved in the music, never a bad sign. Moving from a house of blues to a house of worship, I put on a recording of organ music by Baroque composer Dietrich Buxtehude. I felt this full-bore music would pose a challenge for the Maggies. It did, but they did not disappoint. The diverse tonal colors organist René Saorgin coaxed from the famous 17th-century organ at the Saint-Laurent Cathedral in the Dutch city of Altmaar were revealed in all their magnificent glory. The recordings, on Harmonia Mundi [Harmonia Mundi HM-7-505], are up to that label's exceptional standards, presenting the music performed on several different historic organs in vivid, powerful sound. I easily became lost in the well-structured music, and if the deepest pedal tones of the organ were missing in action, I was not aware of it because what was there was truly "there" -- in mind if not in body.
Given the revealing nature of the MMGi's to whatever format the source originated, I felt it was the first time I heard all the music in Weather Report’s album Tale Spinnin’ [Columbia PC 33417]. The noisemaking arsenals of drummer Leon Ndugu Chancler and percussionist Alyrio Lima were revealed as I’ve rarely heard before, especially on "Badia" and "Freezing Fire." Joe Zawinul’s Rhodes electric piano, Arp and innovative TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra) analog synthesizers cut through the air like aural lightning bolts, lending edge-of-your-seat excitement to the listening experience. The mid-'70s recording by Bruce Botnick captured all the talent, emotion and fireworks of this jazz-infused, Latin-funk organization.The same held true for Blossom Dearie’s singularly girlish voice on "At Last" from the CD reissue of her self-titled 1959 album [Verve 837 934-2], confirming the "reach out and touch it" quality of these speakers, leaving her airy preciousness intact. As song after song unfolded, I felt transported to an intimate supper club in Manhattan where fine china and polished silver flatware sat on white linen tablecloths. In contrast, and moving forward nearly 40 years, the achingly idiosyncratic voice of Mary Margaret O’Hara was captured in all its unsettling purity on her original song "Dark Dear Heart" from the album Puerto Angel by The Henrys [Bar/None Records AHAON-079-2]. The synergy between the quality of the recording and the MMGi's was such that her image was projected just a few feet in front of my nose, creating a quite involving and satisfying listen.It has been said that the inherent design of planar speakers places them at a disadvantage when it comes to dynamic slam and presence. Granted, as opposed to head-bangers who routinely play and enjoy their AC/DC and Metallic albums at volumes well past 12:00 and might prefer more testosterone-infused speakers, I found the Maggies perfectly suitable for my listening tastes and not lacking one iota of excitement. During my listening, I never felt the urge to place the resistors in the signal path to tame the treble -- I welcomed the crystal clarity of the highs and did not at all find them overpowering. Although I was not disappointed with the bass of the MMGi's, I was nonetheless curious to hear what my modest Pioneer SW-8MK2 subwoofer might add (or subtract) from the sound. After making a few connections and adjustments to crossover points, I gave a listen. What I heard made me even more enthusiastic about the Maggies. With the simple addition of a subwoofer costing a hundred dollars and change, the system was transformed into something closer to a truly full-range music reproducer. The low, low bass only implied before the addition of the sub was now explicitly stated. Granted, even though the lowest bass did not have the panache embodied in subs costing much more, extracting the lowest synthesizer notes from electronic music was now possible. For example, I could easily hear the plodding, stomach-churning bass synth on the title song from SBTRKT’s 2014 two-record set Wonder Where We Land [Young Turks YTLP120X] and the insistent bass on "The Light" from that album’s second side. Similarly, the subterranean pulse propelling the song "Raphael" from Torch Song’s 1995 CD Toward the Unknown Region [N-Gram 4509 98969 2] took on an organic life of its own as it pressurized my listening room. I started grinning as I played through a handful of randomly chosen record LPs and CDs. Here, for a price considerably under a grand, was a speaker system that was kicking butt and taking names. At the sane listening levels I embrace, I couldn’t have been a happier listener. But with my pair of SMGa's within easy reach, I couldn’t resist the temptation to compare them to the MMGi's. Placed where the MMGi's had been, the SMGa's were not upstaged by their newer brethren -- a factor lending validity to Jim Winey’s initial vision. In fact, I was truly impressed by just how similar the elderly Magnepans sounded to the MMGi's, especially in terms to their overall transparency and resolution. No detail of the presentation went unnoticed, a characteristic of the sound distracting not in the least from the music’s emotional impact. I noticed that the SMGa's were slightly less sensitive than the MMGi's, requiring a higher setting of the volume control. They also seemed to reduce the depth of the soundstage, though the width remained the same, with sounds coming from well beyond the speakers’ outer frames on some recordings. The vintage Maggies did have a less refined top end with a noticeable edge to the upper mid-treble. With certain recordings, this made listening a bit more exciting but the overall sound less neutral. Their bass was also less well-defined and coherent, having less impact, extension and pace than that of their newer cousins. And yet, despite the shortcomings of the aging Maggies, the rendering of Heidi Happy’s vocals and Til Brönner’s horns on Yello’s Touch Yello was to die for. There was real magic in the vintage panels, a quality retained, and improved upon, in the current iteration. Ultimately though, even though the sound of the two generations of loudspeakers seemed cut from the same cloth, I preferred the spectral balance of the MMGi's to that of their predecessors, the SMGa's lacking the finesse of the newer speakers. A final test of the MMGi's came when I sought to re-create an event recently experienced in New York City. A month before this review was submitted, my significant other and I were treated to the Joe Lovano Nonet performing just a few feet from our ears in the claustrophobic cellar of Max Gordon’s iconic Village Vanguard. With ten musicians -- five saxes (including the leader), trumpet, trombone and rhythm cutting loose on tunes inspired by the late, great Tadd Dameron, the sound came close to overpowering the room. It was hair-raising, but in a good way. Nothing went unheard, including the occasional subway train. How close could the MMGi's come to bringing us back to that evening? How much suspension of disbelief would be required to bring satisfaction? I put the Joe Lovano Nonet 52nd Street Themes [Blue Note Records 7243 4 96667 2 6] into the drawer of the Sony player, queued up "If You Could See Me Now" (heard live that night at the Vanguard) and hit Play. Wow! The visceral sound of this live-to-two-track, all-analog recording hit me right in the gut. It was crisp and tight, with scads of texture. The more I advanced the volume control, the closer I got to that point where wildest expectations were met. I was hesitant to go much beyond 12:00 with the volume knob -- a setting at which sound levels approached 105dB -- fearing speaker damage. I was grinning from ear to ear, however, when my partner shouted from another room, "Didn’t we hear that song in New York? It sounds like we’re still in the club." Enough said.
t seems odd that speakers selling for so little can sound so good. Hell, you can spend considerably more than the asking price of a pair of MMGi's for a record weight! I simply cannot fault these speakers. Over the several months I listened to them, they brought me continuing pleasure with a wide variety of music drawn from various sources and formats. As each LP, CD or file played, the consistent "thereness" of the sound compelled me to listen all the way through before playing another LP, CD or file. There’s a reach-out-and-touch-it immediacy to the sound that I found captivating. On certain recordings, the sense of sound emerging as an entity in three-dimensional space around, above and between the speakers was sometimes unsettling. And not once did I feel deprived of any of the visceral power of the music.
Kudos to Magnepan for delivering the MMGi into a market
rife with upward-spiraling costs and offering an impossibly high-value product in the
process. With Magnepan’s liberal 60-day home-trial policy, you’d be
doing yourself a huge disservice by not giving the MMGi's a listen.
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With their
lightning-fast transient speed and quasi-ribbon tweeters presenting sparkling highs, these
speakers are made for electronic music. The sound assemblies of artists such as
Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, SBTRKT, Richard James, Yello and others never sounded as
compelling, energetic or right as with these speakers. 
The single best word I can
use to describe the sound of the MMGi's is unencumbered, although clear,
free and open fit too. In addition, their crystalline treble and lack of
bass overhang contributed heavily to the pacing of the music. Few speakers in my
experience possess this characteristic, and none at this price. You’d have to
spend four to five times this amount to even begin to approach the MMGi's sound. Add a
modest subwoofer to the mix and be prepared to be amazed. 