LRS+ Update

About five or six weeks ago, I sent Magnepan a message over over their website speaker request form link so that I could ask them some questions about the new speaker directly. I figured it might be a while until I heard from them. Then I saw the video review a few days ago in Absolute Sound and suspected they probably were inundated with inquiries and orders and that I might not hear from them for quite a while.

Then, surprise, they called me last night. I guess they are going through their backlog of contacts one by one. I thought I’d share what I learned.

After Wendell made it public back in April that there would be a new speaker and then after Steve Guttenberg’s review, they were inundated with questions. But, they weren’t quite ready to put the plus model up for sale because they had to finish all the prep work for the new speaker; making the risers, shipping the new speaker with or without risers, seeing if they would survive shipping and still fit after shipping, etc. etc. etc. And they had to contact 2-300 customers who already had orders in place for the LRS and see if they wanted the plus model. Then they had to start contacting people who wanted to place new orders for the LRS+.

I was told that most of the kinks are now worked out. The speakers will ship in one box and the risers in another. Total shipping costs will be about $140. They have about 50 speakers ready (none have shipped) and more in process. It will take them about 2-3 months to satisfy all the prior LRS orders (most of which were upgraded to the +) and then another 3+ months to satisfy the new LRS+ orders.

They didn’t say this but I suspect that they are controlling how quickly they respond to inquiries in order to not let the backlog get beyond 6 months.

They did say that based on the very high percentage of people who wanted their order changed to the plus model, they will probably no longer offer the original LRS model.

I hope this is helpful to those who are interested.