LaScalla "horn" sound compared to "maggie" sound

I have only heard Maggies in stores but I owned a pair of La Scalas for a couple of years.  They are extremely dynamic speakers that can give a feeling of listening to live music.  The bass doesn't go extremely low but it is very quick and realistic sounding.  Depending on the room, you can probably get usable bass response into the mid to upper 40's.  I put Bob Crites crossovers and tweeters in mine and it really opened up the sound, but the crossovers had 30 year old capacitors in them, so it was time for replacement of those parts.  They really like a big room, the bigger the better, although I thought they worked well in my 21 x 12 foot room.  The downside, other than the shear size of the suckers, is they are bright in the upper midrange/lower treble region.  Some folks seem more sensitive to this than others.  Also, they don't do detail as well as many modern designs.  I never heard them with tubes, but many say they really shine with low power tube amps.  Oh, and if you like to tinker, there are a million things you can do to them to tailor the sound to your liking.  Kind of reminds me of the muscle cars of my youth -- no one ran them stock.  Definitely a different experience than your Maggies.

Crap, misspelled "sheer."

Ver interesting. I am a former La Scala owner and currently own Magnepan .7's with subwoofer reinforcement. Actually, I had toyed with the idea of trying the Heresy III's recently for similar reasons as you. I listen to a lot of electric blues and thought they might be a nice fit. However, whenever I switched from Maggies(owned several) to a conventional box speaker I missed that sense of "height" the Maggies offer. Back to the La Scalas, they made my ears bleed. I had a nice McIntosh solid state integrated amp paired with them. In my room they were unbreakable. Plus, they are large and cumbersome looking to me. I think that there are better choices in the heritage line. That's my two cents, been there. Good luck and enjoy the journey!

hard to beat a line source...

I went from planars to horns back in 2006, sort of the reverse process--though it was Quads, not Maggies, and Avantgarde Duos, not Klipsch. So, I can't speak to the specific speakers you are talking about (though I played with Maggies many times back in the day), I can tell you about my experience in general. The horn speaker, for me, was more persnickety about everything upchain--and the SQ varied dramatically based on the rest of the system. Midrange was comparable to a good stat, but with a far more "in the room" quality and that so-called "jump" factor.  Same issues of bass lightness or discontinuity as stats when it came to mating woofers- of course, the original big K-horn solved that by corner loading. Size of image- Maggies present huge. It's fun, great for large scale music, my recollection was that they didn't have the pinpoint imaging that stats did- though more modern Maggies with ribbon tweeters and judicious set up may improve that. Horns- you don't even care about image, as such, because the of the "in the room" quality. --'Tis fun to have both. I just got my old Quad '57s restored. My horns are in storage awaiting a new room.