Magnepan 3.7 - 3.7i owners need help please

I  spent many years with MGIIIs then upgraded to the 3.7s (not i) and they took several hundred hours to catch up to the IIIs.  Your amp is excellent, I use the Magtech with my 20.7s and would NEVER switch. Read the Magtech reviews on Rogers website, one of them was done at my house with my 20.7s.  One suggestion that I will +1 on is to get Mye stands, the 3.7s really benefit from the additional stiffness from the Mye stands.  Another tweek that I found is to use a tube pre-amp in front of the Magtech, I started with a MC 2300 and NOS Mullard 4004s in the driver stage, and now use the MC 1100 with the same Mullards, a truely perfect combination!

I have a pair of 30 year old Maggie IIIa's and a pair of new 3.7I's and have to agree that the newer Maggies took hundreds (300-500) of hours to break in. Until they broke in, the soundstage was diffuse, and the bass was less than stellar.  Honestly they were a mess until breaking in. 

The new speakers definitely added a strip of felt behind part of the midrange. My guess is that it is to dampen the back wave reflection and allow the speaker to be placed closer to the FW, thus making the speaker more spouse friendly. It is obvious when looking at a 3.7 vs a 3.7i. Magnepan is famously reluctant to give details though. 

One tip with the i series is that they need -- according to Wendell --  to have the woofer panel slightly closer than the ribbon tweeter. This of course means that if your tweets are in that you need a lot of toe in, possibly more than you are used to. Less toe in with tweets out. You can see the effect of getting the tweets further away in measurements as it mostly reduces a suck out around the crossover which is readily apparent if the tweets are the same or closer.  

I have not heard the 3.6, but compared to the IIIa, the 3.7i has more detail, has a much smoother and tamer upper midrange, more upper bass and substantially less low bass.  The older speakers go down to the upper twenties while the new ones end in the upper thirties.  (In the 30 years of evolution they made the woofer panels smaller and the midrange larger).

i am currently running both pairs. The 3.7i's are being run in my smaller room with Pass 250.5 amplification and are about 7.5 feet from the FW, tweets in lots of toe in. I am running the older pair in a much larger room tweets out, about the same distance from the FW, with DWMs to boost the mid bass.  I drive the second pair with the 1700 watts into 2 ohm Emotiva XPA1s (the DWMs and larger room make the tough Maggie load tougher).

I prefer the Pass Labs and 3.7i, but there are pros and cons to both systems. 

I’ve started buying and listening to Magnepans in the 80’s. There is one thing the speakers are very consistent at - demonstrating if not highlighting any weaknesses or incompatibilities in the system that is driving them. That only seems to get worse with each subsequent speaker or line of speakers they come out with. The problem may be that the 3.7i’s are more demanding and more revealing than the 3.6’s and there’s something in your system they are not getting along with.

The Magtech amplifier was built to drive electrostatic speakers. Magnepans are not electrostatic speakers. The Magtech is also a solid state amplifier. My experience is that Magnepans do better with tube electronics. I suspect an all-tube amplifier (not hybrid) may sound better than a solid state, even if it is of lower current rating. I listened to a pair of Tympani IVa’s for many many hours with an Audio Research D90-B amplifier rated at 89 WPC. It sounded better than several pairs of Tympani IVa’s I heard in dealer showrooms connected to top-shelf solid state electronics with a lot more current and overall power, including Krell electronics. More power/current is not always the answer.

The business of turning a digital signal into analogue is as much art as science. The HGC DAC3 is also solid state. You might consider one of Audio Research’s tube-based DAC units or even a Bruce Wenger “BWS Dual Mono Ultimate Performance Line Stage” preamplifier.

If the 3.7i’s are not performing to your expectations after a good 400-500 hours of break-in and you’d prefer to not invest another king’s ransom in electronics, the solution might be to go back to a pair of 3.6r’s. Like Microsoft proves to us over and over again, sometimes it’s better to leave things alone.

tdenmark, you might want to read the "What is the best amplifier for Magneplanars?" section on the Magnepan website and read the white papers on Rogers site, you will find that the Magtech can be used with any speaker, its regulated powersupply is exactly what driving a Magnepan demands when they write The power supply is "what separates the men from the boys." Tube amps are great but they dont have the brute power that Maggies demand to sound their best.  Putting tubes in front of a good solid state amp is the receipe for getting the most out of Magnepans.

Hello everyone...

Here's a rather alarming update on my issue. I knew something was just not right with these speakers.

Turns out that one of my brand new speakers left the factory with either mis-wired crossovers or something amiss inside the crossover section.

On one speaker the bass section plays from 30hz to 9khz, the midrange plays from 30hz to 5khz, and the tweeter plays from 700hz to 13khz. Well, I think that's rather a substantial problem!

Talked to the dealer and looks like they are going back to Magnepan.

How does this get missed, are they not thoroughly tested before being shipped. Are there more are out there like mine.

it be checked easy enough. Thanks