Magnepan 1.7 too bright, HELP

You should be 7.4 feet from your back wall. Just try it.

www.cardas.com/content.php?area=insights&content_id=26&pagestring=Room+Setup

A good tube pre under $500 maybe a bit hard to find. Two budget unit with good review comes to mind are the AES DJH and Mapletree 4 SE. But both of them is in the $700-$800 price range. You can keep an eye on those if you can stretch your budget a bit.

My Maggie 1.7's are in a room with 9 foot ceilings, 35 feet long and 15 wide. Fully carpeted with couch, loveseat, and chair. Palm trees behind the speakers. The room is on a lower level with stairs near the listening end and an el around the back so it opens up behind the listening position.

The speakers are four feet from the front wall (15 foot wall) and about seven feet apart. I sit about ten feet away (which is too close to get the full effect of different instruments in space). This means about 20 feet behind me. I would like to move to 3.6's or 3.7's but do not think that they will fit given the current room setup. (Mancave to a point but with a healthy dose of WAF!)

I have the tweeters oriented "in" which helped with focus and imaging. Moving them around inch by inch impacts the bass. Mye stands (new used on Audiogon) have made a noticeable improvement in bass.

The speakers have been used for about 350 hours. They seem to continue to improve in the richness of the sound. They started out a little analytical and bright but have mellowed. An improvement.

I have not made the plunge to any special interconnects or speaker wire. Using "no name" stranded wire for the speakers that is thicker than lamp cord. My interconnects are home made from a Walmart out door patio cord with soldered RCA connectors and heat wrap.

I listen to some vinyl, but mostly CDs through a tubed Audiospace CD8.

I run a 300 wpc/4ohm Krell that can play quite loud when I am in the listening position. The volume goes from 0 to 150. If I go above 90 it will overheat and autoshutdown occurs. When the wife comes to talk I have to turn the volume down to about 50 which is a loud background level in order to hear her. We have a bar at the far end of the room and when I sit there I want them louder. Also, I think that 300 wpc into 4 ohms is not enough to carry the peaks.

So...Wyred4Sound SX1000 and STP SE are on order from Underwood Hifi.

By the way, Wally says that Wyred4Sound is contemplating a "reference" line of amps that can be played in digital or tubed mode. They will have better asethetics. Price will be much higher than SX series and the digital side of the sound will not be any different.

There is a mapletree 2 se selling in audiocircle. U may be interested.
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=93617.0

For the record I too own a 'd' ICE amp....

Be careful with 'd' amps. The Krell sure cooks, doesn't it? Maybe better ventilation? I tested 3.6s with the xi400 integrated and it sure got warm, and I didn't even try to abuse it. In my less than perfect space for amp, I'd kill it in a week.

Anyway, back to 'd' amps. The ICE modules are NOT whatever power FTC rating. No 1 hour at 1/3 power preconditioning and STRICT time limits at full power. The ASP module used in the kilowatt amps is ONLY 30 seconds at full power. My 500 watter is 60 seconds. Figure the efficiency at 100% power is about 83%, plug to speaker. That is a lot of power ALL going to heat. Go to the B&O website and look at some photos. Not much heatsink in any of those modules.
That doesn't mean they don't work in to REAL loads with MUSIC. Especially since music will only consume a fraction of an amps power with the rest being dynamics...at which the 'd' amps excel.
The take away here is to take the power ratings with a grain of salt.

You may like the panels flipped around. I spend a lot of time.....maybe 15 or 20 minutes per session tuning my speakers. When I got 'em where I wanted, I carefully documented and MEASURED the location. I used the wooded side stiles as marks and carefully drew my room in Google Sketchup and place the speakers.....A little trig and I know where the speakers 'cross' and the angle at which they are toed in.

You have a nice space. The ONLY red flag is the length being about 4x the height, but this is made better by the characteristics of panel/dipoles.

If I had really.....reallly deep pockets, I check out a Pass INT-150 and make whatever accomodations necessary if it sounded right. Maybe end up sleeping in the garage.....and eating rice and beans for a couple years.