Magnepan MG-1.7i (65h, 19w, 2d)

Magnepan MG1.7
How would you like to have Shelby Lynne visit your house? She could sit on a stool in your living room while singing the night away with a tender, sparse guitar technique. She would fit in the room quite easily. You could sit on the couch and concentrate on the beauty and nuance of her voice and guitar playing. The air around her voice, the fine detail of a guitar eight feet away… It would be a pretty impressive evening’s entertainment!

OK. It isn’t likely that Shelby is coming to your house, or mine either. But… we CAN make a pretty good representation of this event that will never happen.

It starts with great loudspeakers. For presenting a realistic LIFE SIZED image of a real performer, singing and playing her guitar in your room, TO YOU, consider the Magnepan MG-1.7i.
The 1.7i hits the sweet spot in the Maggie line. The size of the image is realistic. The 65” tall and 19” wide panel casts a sound stage that equivocates a real performance. Whether at low or high volume, the music comes at you in a life sized wave. It’s coasting.

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Due to the low mass of the speaker diaphragm, the detail of vocal and guitar is as realistic as anything you can buy! If your goal is to hear acoustic music in your living room that sounds like the real musicians, Maggies are worth your audition.

Technically the Maggie is constructed of an ultra thin, lightweight Mylar diaphragm almost as large as the speaker itself. Strips of foil are glued to the diaphragm. A perforated plate with bar magnets is placed in close proximity. As the signal is fed into the foil strips, the speaker pulses back and forth to create music.

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This design is patented. Don’t try to make them in your basement. You don’t have the skill that Magnepan craftsmen have. They aren’t opening UPS boxes of woofers/tweeters and screwing them into boxes.

MG-1.7i is a three way design. If you look at the foil traces closely, you’ll see the woofer in the larger strips, the tweeter and super tweeter in the thinner strips. The mass that has to be moved is minimal. The impedance is very friendly for your amplifier, ruler flat, 4 ohms. Your amp will approximately double its 8 ohm rating into 4 ohms.

There’s a misnomer than Maggies need a lot of power. That’s only true when you’re pounding rock and roll or system busters- in which case they’re the wrong speakers PERIOD.

If you’re listening at the level that real acoustic instruments would create in your living room, the Maggies will be happy with 50 or 100×2 into 8 ohms.


Some of our favorite amps to drive them:

Rogue Sphinx V3 Integrated Amp, $1700, 100×2

NAD C-399, $2200 180×2

Hegel H-120, $3000, 75×2