Maggies and rolled off treble

the new maggies are hot on the treble if anything.

Indeed on the 3.3/3.5/3.6 series. Unless the system has a severely rolled off top end, a power resistor value of 1-2 ohms is a must on the tweeter attenuation terminal.

Do the older models also have such terminals? If so, is there a resistor there? And if so, try a lower value or none at all.

I have MG1.6, and a spectrum analyser to determine frequency response. The 1.6 does roll off the top 1/3 octave a few dB, which I can correct using an equalizer. Other than this top 1/3 octave the high end range is really flat, as per the Magneplanar specs. The owner's manual suggests that you may want to use the 1 ohm tweeter padding resistor (that they supply) to roll off the trebble. They say that a flat speaker may sound "hot" on the high end because recordings are often boosted on the high end to compensate for the rolled-off highs of many brands of speakers. With Maggies, the choice of tweeter padding resistor is left up to the user. Nice.

I would expect the Maggies which use the ribbon tweeter to be flat to, and above 20KHz as per the Magneplanar specs. However, they probably also need the resistor to sound flat with many commercial recordings.

Yes I had the newer Magnepans as well, but traded in the very old generation ones, as the midrange was not au par with my former beloved Quad ESL 57.
The new Magnepans are indeed more detailed, but at the same time lesser musical, lesser emotional, and more analytical---> this will result that some persons will interpret this as an technical advancement, and some other persons simply do not like it, so a kind of interpretation, and a kind of taste.

My Mg-1's are somewhat rolled off at the top. I changed the IC's from pre to amp from Monster 250's to M 1000 II's and noticed an improvement. I'm looking to upgrade the speaker wires from Radio shack to something more revealing.
Any suggestions under $100, 8ft., bananas at least on one end would be appreciated. Tfm 35 amp, chase technology pre, Sirius and Sony 200 disc as sources, Audioquest quartz as IC's. My goal for my office system is to get the best sound for the least amount of money. So far, retail-$3500. Actual cost- $500. Dan

I can say that older Maggies sound so appealing because of the rolled off treble, the emphasis on midrange, the transparency and punchy bass. Therefore they are quite forgiving with regard to less immaculate recordings. And that's for most people a very pleasant feature. IMHO there are more revealing speakers, but they won't be as appealing to most people as the Maggies. That's why Maggies are so popular among people and that's why many people consider their sound as SOTA, but in fact they are psychoacoustically "tuned" devices and are therefore not truly SOTA. But hey, we want a musical sounding system, not a system that is SOTA on paper but not SOTA with regard to musicality. Or don't we?

Chris