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My used Magnepan 1.6's are missing sparkly treble. Why?

I recently bought a pair of used Magnepan 1.6 speakers.  Unclear how old they are but they appear to be in good condition and the panels look good when shining a flashlight through.  And the speakers sound good except they are almost completely lacking in that bright sparkly treble that I thought they were known for.  Something like  chimes or a triangle simply isn't in the music played through the 1.6's.  If you stand right next to the speaker you can hear those instruments very muted but not at any normal listening distance.  I've tried googling to see if this is a known problem with these old 1.6's but without any luck.  

Does anybody know what might be causing this or if it is fixable?
pinwa
pinwa OP
291 posts
 
11K is about it for me.  I'm curious how high you hear?  Assuming this tone generator is accurate you should be able to get a pretty precise measure of the limits of you hearing.

https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/
gammonit_2000
83 posts
 
Well I can hear up to 14k maybe a bit higher according to the tone generator.  It is a pretty annoying tone at 14k and I would like to say I can hear it at 15k too but maybe not so much.
gmosley
129 posts
 
I would go to a dealer in my area and see if the dealer has a pair that has the same tweeter in another speaker or ask the dealer if you can do a side by side comparison of both speakers, then if there is no dealer in your area. send them back to magnepan and let them restore them back to the speaker they was and you can ask them if they can send you a box for them. they did for me when i had a bad pair and they did a rebuild. which was a waste of time. the speaker fell apart.
pinwa OP
291 posts
 
I thought I should provide an update to my original post.  Since I wasn't sure what was going on with the 1.6's and there was a very good used 1.7 for sale locally at a good price I ended up getting that also.  Overall I liked the 1.7 better and the treble might have been a bit better but still not what I expected.  However, I kept playing around with the placement of the speaker and positioning the 1.7's tweeter on the inside and a little more toed in and that definitely improved the over all sound but cymbals and top hats still seemed to be somewhat lacking.  Reading more posts about how others had placed their Maggies I noticed many users thought they were better tilted forward slightly.  So today I made that small adjustment by sliding a CD case just under the rear stands.  And that definitely made a big difference in the overall sound and especially the high end.  The 1.7's now sound realistically bright and closely match what I'm hearing if I listen on the Ananda headphones.  And that also may explain why the 1.6's seemed so disappointing since they were actually set up to be tilted back by about the same amount as my 1.7's are now tilted forward.  I feel like I mostly have the 1.7's dialed in now but it is amazing how sensitive they are to small changes in positioning.  That fussiness is probably why they aren't more popular.
uberwaltz's avatar
uberwaltz
13,381 posts
 
Tilted back?
Oh heck no...lol
My baby Maggies gave me a huge improvement in SQ when i played with positioning but mostly due to me tilting them forward.
And yes tweeters on the inside gave best results.
There likely then is not much wrong with the 1.6 to start with
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