Magnepan 1.7 too bright, HELP

Use 1.5 ohm resistors.

If you read all of the string, and know Maggies, the problem starts with the amp. Positioning et al is not going to change the fact that there's not enough juice to run the panels, and the other gear tends to brightness anyway.

Just wasting time.

There is a lot of good advice and good ideas here. The take home message is that most of what you have may not be the best match with the 1.7's.

I'm with Macdadtexas on the importance of good clean power. I use CAD 500 MB's with my Maggies. Unfortunately you are not going to spring 3-4K on an amp right now. You are trying to work on the cheap, so here is my hierarchy using mostly suggestions from the threads. Buy used to save money. Each one of these will help.
1) < $200 Deaden the corners, floor to ceiling. Glue Auralex panels to blue insulation pannels. You may be very surprised.
2) < $500 Promethius TVC volume control. I use a Promethius Ref 4 with my Maggies. You will want to watch the length of your IC's and use an amp with a reasonably high input impedence if possible.
3) < $700 I like the Eastern Electric DAC suggestion above. I've had Denon players with Maggies before and they were not a good match.
4) As Macdadtexas points out, you can do all of the above and still not completely fix the problem. But it sounds like you may need to wait a while before you can really get an amp that will do justice to the maggies. Just keep in mind that you are going to need to get the amp replaced at some point.

Your problem is simple,you have Ferrari speakers running on WalMart tires.Providing you have the financial resources you most definitely should replace the source and the amp.Cable upgrades will help but improvements will be less than dramatic.
I agree with others that have recommended room treatments.
I've owned several Magnepan speakers and I can provide you with some recommendations for equipment upgrades if you care to flip me a pm.

NOBODY has suggested the cure which worked for me.

My 1.6s were bright, too. And very beamy. Too much toe and the highs were nearly unbearable, while the center image was razor sharp and little sound extended beyond the outside edges of the speakers.
Tweeters in/out didn't make much difference.
Toe OUT until the balance was right and you could get a hole in the middle effect.

The cure? 15 or so years ago, Magnepan started shipping with the Mylar forward, to the listener. I kid you not, when I suggest FLIPPING THE PANELS around to listen to the pole piece side. This will improve dispersion to the point that a wider toe angle will be fine.....I am at about 10 or 11 degrees which is about 3 1/2 inches difference between measures of inside and outside of the speaker to the 'front' wall. Widening the toe will take you out of the tweeter 'hot spot' on axis and improve image while providing fine center fill and a near wrap-around sound field.

Save all that expense of cable / amp / dac / seance stuff until you finish experimenting with speaker orientation and placement.
At that point, some diffusion BEHIND and BETWEEN the speakers works wonders. At least you aren't running your Ferrari on Firestones.