@daveyf
Really, saving me money?
Has Magnepan ever offered a better crossover to see if I would willingly pay $2,500 instead of $2,200 on the 1.7 series? We are talking about a discretionary income purchase here, not a necessity and the convenience of getting this upgrade is more than worth the extra dollars to me.
I'm not alone in this opinion as people that are inveterate tinkerers make YT videos showing us how cheap the stock product is made and what can be achieved with modifications, and some people take the time to record comparisons that a good dac and headphones will reveal a demonstrable difference. And some people make a living off of the modifications, either completely or as part of their line of upgrades to a number of speaker manufacturers.
If Mag can make a 15-20% better sounding speaker how many more people in this hobby would pay what some people consider an inadequate amount for speaker cables or interconnects to have "the only reasonable choice" in a price segment? There are only a handful of "full range" speakers in this price range that have adequate low level bass where a sub is not needed to have satisfactory bottom end, so whether they are smaller boxes or smaller panels, the person interested in the quality of sound is going to have to lay out at least $1k per side in addition to the speaker pair price.
Wendell reminds me of an senior engineer I worked with at Polaroid back in the 90's who said that ccd cameras will never be inexpensive enough for the general public because $165 was the cheapest we could buy an LCD display to put in a camera. Because of him and his lack of understanding of what was going on in the markets and the offshoring of manufacturing, and others like him at that company they didn't jump into that market with both feet where other photography companies were, and they missed the digital boat and went out of business.
Of course I could make a more convincing argument to that point by discussing their marketing department, but that would just be cruel in this context.