Noob Planar Speaker Advice Needed

You will not get mids that blow you away with planars or cones if you don't put bass traps in the room. I'd start with a good amount of bass traps before buying new speakers. Something like GIK Tri Traps. They can be moved to a future room easily. They can go in corners, can be stacked in corners, can go along floor/wall boundaries too.

What you should get with planars over cones isn't necessarily better mids, but different mids. A more seamless midrange maybe. What you should experience also is the dipole deep and airy sounstage. Also the super fast quickness of transients, attack and decay, but once again, you won't experience this if you don't have bass traps. Poor bass response in the room will mask this. The other thing you'll need to do is commit to putting the speakers well out in to the room, further than you would cones. See the Cardas dipole calculator to see what the location is.

And you already probably know about the power you'll need.

The ET's have some advantages over Maggie 1.6s IMO. They arguably do not require as much current, but still need power. This can be a cost differentiators. Also, I would speculate you'd need to modify the Maggies to equal the ET's. And the ET's have high frequency adjustment. And you might need a subwoofer with the 1.6 but not with the ET's.

At 0-dark 30, (that's REAL late) I have been known to face my Maggies AT one another and sit in between. Like the ULTIMATE open air headphone.

When the house is THAT quiet, you can feel the rosin come off the bow. You get the feeling you are IN the performance room, sitting among the players.

All your choices are good. No speaker is perfect but all the ones you listed are very enjoyable. You might even try the little MMG @599 pair and a small sub like the Hsu 10 inch @350. Your room will be fine but you'll have to pull the speakers out from the wall a bit (5 feet or more). Good luck.

Thanx, Russ

I want to piggyback on your question. With an magnepan smg or magnepan mmg's, what tube amplification would be fine to run them? I cannot spend a lot on a tube amp. Is this a futile match?

Thanks

Ive had some insanely exspensive setups, and my current budget system is now the best Ive ever heard. Our rooms are very close in size and ceilings. I'm about 9 to10ft from the speakers, and they are 36-40" from the front wall. Toe in is about 7-10 degrees or so. They are about5-6ft apart. I use a pair of 0.27 ohm resistors from partsexpress (.39 cents each) to reduce the tweeters a HAIR. They are MAGIC. I use a svs ultra 12/2 sub, and filter at 80hz. The sub is placed dead center between the speakers with base off, subs forward. I run the speakers full range though. I use a hard drive and all lossless flac and wav files (PS3 with external hardrive). I use a onkyo NR906 receiver and Emotiva XPA-15 channel amp.

The speakers are the Magnepan 1.6, and I'm in heaven !

Ive owned the Martin Logan aeon i's, Ascent i's, using Bryston and Ayre equipment. The Magnepan 1.6's with the budget gear above, and it smokes them. If the Magnepan's are set up right and you dont want 95-110db's, they cant be beat. Id put my setup against top stuff. Ive owned that stuff. Magnepan just get it right, once you tame the brightness and throw in a clean sub.(get the sub playing acurate) My friends and wife always reply how clean this sounds. All types of music, and even older recordings sound great!