Magnepans in a small room

I have had the MG12s and MMGs in a small room 11x12 and it sounded really good.  the room was treated with auralex 2in thick panels of all shapes, i would say 60% of all walls except ceiling were covered.  I had one 12in diameter foam column on the wall behind the panel to catch/diffuse first reflections behind the speakers.  Speakers were 7in apart, toed-in crossing behind the listener's head.
I probably did not get 100% of what magnepan can do, but imaging and presentation was holographic with good tonal balance, listening mid-field in a semi- acoustically dead room.

My 20.1s sound amazing in my studio. . . Ya their huge but people's jaws just drop at the sound. I have them 3ft from the side walls and 4ft from the back walls and actively bi-amp them with room correction through a Mini DSP and Room EQ Wizard. You may or may not find you need to add more speakers in your small room to do room correction on the lower frequencies to cancel out the nulls and peaks that tend to happen in a small space with MSO (multi sub optimizer). This is the problem area IMHO that full range speakers have in a small space. 

Good Luck :)
- Steve

It helps if the room is dedicated to audio. You have a couple things working against you. The distance of the maggies to the wall behind them. The distance between the your ears and the wall behind them.

Pulling the maggies out 54 inches into the room will help. Then start pushing them back until either the soundstage (Depth especially) collapses to an unacceptable point, or bass suffers too greatly.

And since the room's dimentions are finite, with the maggies out into the room, you won't be able to move your listening chair out too far. The way around this is to treat the wall behind your ears with something absorbant. This helps with two things. With your ears that close to a reflective surface (Rear wall) you're going to get some smearing of treble detail. It may even fatigue you. Any thin cloth behind your ears will alleviate this. The other problem with the rear wall is bass energy will be reinforced (mild boom at some freq). A thin cloth will not absorb bass satisfactorily (it didn't for me). So you'll need to pad the cloth treatment with more material. I suggest multiple layers of fiberglass available from your home improvement store. It will be concealled.

1.6s will work with these treatments in that room size. 12s will sound nearly the same, be more tube-friendly, and won't create as much excess bass energy. If you have to consider the 12s do to room decor, or budget, happily choose the 12s and do not look back.

i am using 1.6s in a room 11 7/8 by 17 3/4, powered by vtl deluxe 120s in triode mode, 45 watts.

i have sound absorbing material--foam on the side wall and behind my chair.

i have several room tunes behind the speakers. the 1.6s are about 6 feet from the back wall.

the result is fine. using various accessories, especially the z sleeve has solved the bass problem.

FORGET IT. I've done MG12's in a 15x14 room and they DID NOT WORK. I'm now using LS3/5a's in that room and they sound great.

-M

Thank you all for taking the time to respond to my question. I especially appreciate the analogy from Audiokinesis.

I used 1.6's in a room that was 10' X 17' with the
speakers on the long wall. I had them set about 4'
from the wall and sat on a sofa against the opposite
wall. It sounded really nice, with a Rel Strata III
in between. They can work in a small room but you have
to be willing to experiment with placement.

I tried the 12's in my office system, it is almost the same size as your room. They just didn't work very well for me.
I moved them into my main room which is much larger and they sounded a lot better. You really have to give them room to work their best.

I just recently sold a pair of 1.6QR's because we moved and the new listening room was only 13 X 16. (The old room was 15 X 25.) Actually the speakers sounded OK in the smaller room but the big problem was placement. Magnepans must be placed away from the rear and side walls. The room served other purposes so it simply didn't work to have them sitting where they needed to be placed to sound their best. If the room would have been solely dedicated to audio I'd probably have kept them.

i listened to both the 12's and 1.6's in 13 x 16 room with an mf a3 int. amp. and thought the 12's did a much better job of displaying the details of the music (i listen to everything but rap and opera) given the space constraints over the 1.6's

Dipoles are in my experience quite forgiving of small rooms and/or wierd room acoustics. I have a customer who used 3 foot wide by nearly 7 foot tall electrostats in a 12 by 12 foot room and was quite happy with them.

You might try setting up your Maggies diagonally, with your listening position close to a corner. That sometimes works well in a small, squarish room.

In my experience dipole speakers are sort of like pianos. A grand piano will sound best in a large recital hall or a concert hall, while a small upright is intended more for a smaller room like a living room. But the grand piano will still sound magnificent in a living room and will outclass the upright piano even if it theoretically isn't able to reach its full potential due to the room size.

Duke

You might get away with 12s in that room. But 1.6s would probably be a bit too much.

Oz

that would work just fine IMO, the 1.6 would fill it well.