Don, they've been a success and that while they're in production there's a wait list to get them. Wendell had told me that he wasn't sure that they'd make any money from them and thought they might just have flagship value, but they've been delighted to find that they're selling well and there's now a wait list.
Their listening room may not be ideal, but would you want it to be? If you go over to ARC, you'll see rooms set up with diffusion and bass trapping, but ARC is listening to amplifiers -- Magnepan has to know how the speakers sound in a more typical listening room and most listeners don't have diffusers or bass traps. Again from talking with Wendell I know that they're aware of the modal behavior of their room and use close measurements and listening in a variety of environments to tune their speakers for the average room. Even so, bass typically swings 10 dB from room to room so with any speaker you have to work carefully with placement and ideally use bass trapping and EQ. It seems to me that dipoles are more susceptible to this than omnis because most of their energy goes into the z-axis axial mode. This means there are fewer rooms modes but they have more of an effect. I've seen this with Quads as well as with Maggies. The solutions are again some combination of placement, bass trapping, and EQ, and in the smaller speakers adding diaphragm area in large rooms with the DWM.
Otherwise, if you look back in the Planar Asylum I think you'll see that there have been complaints about dealer demos of Maggies for years. They're seldom shown at their best. And also that those of us who own them have to mess with their position quite a bit to get them to sound their best! This of course is true of any speaker, but it seems to be more true of dipoles.
The consensus among the few who have heard the 30.7's set up properly, mostly critics, seems to be that you have to spend more than $100,000 to equal the sound of the 30.7's. I haven't heard them yet myself, but as someone with Tympani IVa's I can easily believe that, as the IVa's are already remarkable speakers despite their age and every single component has been improved in the 30.7.
Like Stickman, I'll be curious to hear from people who have them at home.
