MG 20.1 or Wisdom audio m-75

Tireguy and Gladstone, please, what MG20.1 modifications are you talking about and who makes them? Are they a mistery, or is it that you don't know exactly?

Vladimir- The upgrades are sort of a homegrown tweak. I have worked with highly regarded audio guru's(most in the biz) paired with a little common sense and a LOT of experimenting. What Gladstone and I have done is some what involved, first you MUST bypass the fuse and midrange fuses and attenuators and all of magnepans factory connection(except where they go into the drivers themselves) for that matter. An all external passive crossover network, made with high end components, internally rewire the speaker(though not the panel itself) and then get some form of stand that does more then just hold the speakers up. I have also removed the internal grill from the front of the speaker, it still has the external grill that you see with the fancy trim. You must be even some what technically capable and willing to perform surgery on your speakers, no company makes full hot rod conversions for magnepans. I was thinking of doing it, but not only is there not much money in doing it, I think its fun to have a real knowledge of what's really going on in your speakers. Even if someone made a kit that they could ship you, you'd still need to "gut" the speaker yourself. I know cardas makes some sort of wiring kit, but there is no way its an internal rewiring of the speaker. If you have any specefic question contact me privately and I can give you all the information/experiences I have gathered.

Tireguy is right. It's not simple. But it involves creating a single crossover, combining the internal and external, as well as rewiring the crossover so that a separate run of cables runs to it.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Tireguy. I see most modifications are commonsensical ones except for the external passive crossover. If going to that extreme kind of work, an active crossover would be better, IMHO.

Vladimir- That's not really true, you really should NOT alter the signal going to the mids/highs in any way. Even a high end active crossover will add/remove artifacts from the signal and I have found it removes the overall musicality of the speakers(one of the main reasons I like these speakers so much). However if you were to make a simpler passive network only for the mids/highs and feed it a non-altered signal and use an active low pass crossover for the bass panel I think you would be on to something- though would it be worth it? Both Gladstone and I are bi-wiring our speakers and the improvement from doing that was tremendous! However, there are added costs and circumstances that make me not interested in bi-amping the speakers. For me I don't have the room to have 2 more mono-blocks, not to mention the desire for the added heat in the summer(my central air can hardly keep up as is). And I don't think Gladstone is going to be in a rush to pick up another set of Class Omicron mono's, for similar reasons.

He has been experimenting with a REL sub with superb results, he has it crossed over at 22hz and we spoke the other day about how EVERYTHING has gotten better. I am thinking about it, but right now I am so happy, why mess with anything :)

There are many ways to achieve an amazing system around maggies, but you've got to do a little work to get around there shortcomings. A lot of folks use active's and rave about the results, I know of a small handful who have done passives and raved about the results, and most who have tried both(who have a true reference quality system) prefer passive. There is also more flexibility to tune the sound to your liking with passives, a simple cascading bypass on your caps. and you can get a significantly different sound from using a different cap.

Now I am starting to ramble......... so I'll stop before I get carried away with myself :)