My apologies for the late reply. Life has been busy and trying to squeeze in time to get everything settled in has been challenging. I'll follow up with more thoughts later but all I can say is that these speakers are very honest. The 100's will reveal the weak link upstream.
I started with swapping out my Don Sachs preamp for my Placette passive. I really like the Don Sachs but I felt it colored the imaging too much to where it could be called euphonic. The 100's also helped figure out what tweaks I need to make further upstream which was my Lector Digitube v1 (circa 2009). This is where I've been spending my time since my last post where I was trying to find the right tube. I went from 12at7 to 12au7 and settled on 12bh7. (*Shoutout to iCloseouts tubes for helping me find what I was looking for*). Short answer on that tube journey was due to the efficiency of the 100's compared to the 1.6's. There was too much gain with the 12at7.
I don't want to make this post about the Lector dac but the 100's has really helped me focus on what needed to by tuned.
For now, all I can say about the 100's is that they are much more efficient, neutral, transparent, musical and dynamic than the Maggie 1.6. With to the bandpass, I think the soundstage has much more presence. I've never heard that in my system before. Music just sounds more "solid". The 100's have traits of my 1.6's but to a much higher qualitative level (top to bottom). Never thought I would own a reference pair of speakers. Props to TJ for helping me out with my new audio journey.
To be continued....