@smodtactical, Maggies needing "a nice big space to sound good" is only partially true. They, like any and all dipoles, have to be a good distance from the wall they are in front of. What that distance is, is a matter of opinion; in a recent posting on Audiogon, Ralph Karsten of Atma-Sphere stated outright that the distance should be no less than 5’. I said the same a few months ago, and one Maggie owner reacted by saying that was an over-statement, that people are now saying it just because everyone else is saying it.
I can’t speak for everybody else, but I (and, I believe, Ralph) say it because you want the sound from the rear of the panels to reach your ears no less than 10ms after that from the front of the speakers. Two sounds coming from the same direction less than 10ms apart in time are perceived by the brain as being part of the same acoustic event. The rear wave "smears" the sound of the front wave. It also creates comb-filtering, a concept too involved to go into here. The panels don’t HAVE to be 5’ from the wall; it is the 10ms delay that is important---any way you achieve that is fine.
My preferred loudspeakers since 1972 have been dipoles, and I’ve had them (magnetic-planars, ESL’s, ribbons) in ALL kinds of rooms. In my opinion, the further from the front wall (that behind the speakers), the better. There is one hardcore Japanese Maggie lover who came up with a room-positioning technique that got nicknamed "Limage"; he proposes bringing the panels almost to the center of the length of the room (about 40% from the front towards the back), and placed almost touching the side walls. That of course requires a room longer than many have; if you want to be 8’ from the panels (a minimum, I would say), and want the panels to be at least 5’ from the wall behind them, and the Limage technique demands the panels be 40% down the length of the room, how long must that room be? I’ll leave the math to you!
I would say that if you have a room about 14’ wide and 16’ long, you have enough space for a pair of Maggies. Put each panel 18" from its’ side wall, and the panels 8’ apart (18" for each side space, 18" for each Maggie---assuming it’s the 1.7i; the 3.7i is 24" wide, and 8’ between the panels adds up to 14’), and 5’ from the front wall. 5’ from the room’s 16’ length allows you to sit 8’ from the panels and 3’ from the rear wall, all totaling 16’. If one dimension has to be sacrificed, make it the length. Sitting closer to the back wall will require that wall be treated with sound-absorbing panels (you’ll be too close to it for diffusion to be an option), but that is better than positioning the speakers closer to the front wall.
Dipoles can, however, be put almost right up against side walls, unlike monopoles. Their front-to-back dipole cancellation creates a figure-of-8 radiation pattern, creating a null (little sound) to either side of the panel. In his recent demonstrations of the new flagship MG30.7, Magnepan’s Wendell Diller did just that with the bass panels, positioning them about a foot from the left and right walls. When you do that, the tweeter drivers should of course be on the inside edge of each speaker, closest to each other.
Maggies also need to be toed in towards the listening area, not just because of off-axis high frequency drop-off, but to bring the speaker’s drivers into time alignment with one another. Then there is the matter of the acoustical treatment of the room. Because of dipole cancellation, side wall reflections are less of a concern than with monopoles. But the front wall (again, behind the speakers) is MORE of a concern. Diffraction of the rear wave---the random "scattering" of the sound reaching that wall from the rear of the panels, is preferred by many dipole users, though not all.
