Daydream, I'm a big Maggie fan and love the 3.6/3.7s. But I'm not sure if that would be the right speaker for you. You'll have to pull them out 6 feet into the room and they will need lots of power, I'm thinking 250wpc minimum. You'll also want to add a subwoofer for some added weight. I can't recommend a speaker for you, I know what I like, but in your case and your desire to listen to older stuff, I'm thinking something efficient and a nice tube amp. Good luck with your shopping.
Bad recordings and high end audio
Hello. Have decided that the kids are out of the house and I can dedicate some space and money to my long ignored hobby. What is different now is there are so few audio stores. I firmly believe in listening to products so thus I start this great new chapter of my life. The first 2 stores I went to the people were very patient with me and I listened to a ton of combinations. They asked me did I want to hear anything else and I said yes, ummm,.. how about Led Zeppelin? I received the same response from both stores which was “all Led Zeppelin recordings are horrible” except for this one version of Led Zeppelin 2…blah blah. So I said what happens if I am at home and i have a desire to play Led Zeppelin or another perceived poor recording? They did not have an answer for me nor did they play Led Zeppelin lol . I ended up ordering a pair of Magnepan 3.7i’s from a different store. 13 weeks until I get them, ouch. I am going to guess that people do listen to poor recordings on great systems because you just want to hear a particular album, right? Or am I missing something? Just looking for a bit of insight. Yes, I know they want it to sound the best so I will buy it but is that the only motivation. Or maybe they hate Led Zeppelin, lol.
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When I was a budding audiophile in the '70s I bought a pair of Stax SR5 electrostatic headphones to upgrade from my Sennheiser HD414s. Great records of the day, like "Catch Bull", or "Workingman's" sounded awesome, but what really got me was how amazing they made my collection of Chess "Real Folk Blues" mono blues records sound. These are NOT HiFi by any stretch. Howling Wolf was right in my head, as vivid as can be. The electrostat's lack of distortion freed the music to express itself. That's when I learned that a system that sounds awful with lesser recordings really isn't that great. Maggie 3.7is are excellent...just focus on an electronic combo that has tube musicality and high current amplification...best accomplished with a tube preamp and a SS amp (even class D can work). |
I have a vivid memory from my newbie days bringing a Zep LP to a speaker demo and wondering aloud why the pair I was interested in had no bass. The store owner answered “because this recording has no deep bass” which surprised and shocked me. Then he put on a different recoding that actually had well recorded deep bass and I realized he was right. |
And that last comment by dodgealum1 is exactly right. In my earlier comment about comparing Radio head and def leppard recordings to led zep, I should have mentioned this: compare those recordings to "when the levee breaks". You know that the opening drum beat on this song should have kicked base ass. but it doesn’t. You know the deep base is there but no matter what you do, there is no way to pull it out as its just not on the recording. Even worse, when the harmonica and guitars kick in, the drum beat falls off even more. terrible, awfull, criminal recording engineering. Again, the greatest rock band of all time absolutely blew it on their recordings forever. what a colossal loss. |
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