I generally try to avoid talking about 2 things too much: tweeters and, at my wife's often frantic request when we're with others, how bald eagles taste like chicken.
Speaking as we sometimes do, however, about excellent tweeters and treble transducers, professional audio reviewer Chris Martens once stated in a fairly recent review:
"Magnepan’s ribbon tweeter features an ultra-thin aluminium foil ribbon approximately ¼-inch wide and five feet long. Many audiophiles regard this tweeter as one of the finest high-frequency transducers in the world and I count myself in that group; it offers smooth and beautifully extended highs and astonishingly quick and nuanced handling of treble transients and textures.
Magnepan offers few details on the crossover of the 3.7i, but on the basis of talks with Winey and Diller I gather a time/phase coherent network is used."
To anyone who has listened to the Magnepan 3.7i or 20.7 speakers in person, they certainly know these review statements are rather obviously true. But even though both of these speakers devote 70% of their very large planar-magnetic dipole panel's real estate to bass output below 350 Hz, it's also quite obviously true that their quasi-ribbon bass dipole transducers are able to only approximate the very high quality level in bass performance that their true-ribbon tweeter dipole transducer manages to display in treble performance. These 2 larger Magnepan models also lack the extraordinary extension, power and impact as well as the same extraordinarily realistic dynamics in bass performance that they possess in the treble frequencies.
It's not only evident to me that these very good models lack high quality bass extension and powerful bass dynamics, Magnepan itself acknowledged this reality quite clearly a few years ago by coming out with their 1st new top model speaker design in decades, the model 30.7, that consists of an included pair of separate bass modules in an attempt to compensate.
I suggest the lesson to be learned is that it's likely best if any hi-end speaker company ensures its top speaker model are high quality performers, that they're well balanced and reproduce the entire audible audio spectrum with as high a degree of capability as they can muster, ideally with bass that is accurately and naturally felt as well as heard.
Tim
