Magnepan MG1.7 now priced from...$2,999 in Black Cloth finish with Australian GST taxes and duties paid with 3 year local warranty and free delivery

Magnepan MG1.7 now priced from...$2,999 in Black Cloth finish with Australian GST taxes and duties paid with 3 year local warranty and free delivery

The highly anticipated Australian release of Magnepans new MG1.7 model.
The 1.7 is now on demonstration at our East Gosford showroom...

See the unveiling of our first pair to land in Australia : click here to view our youtube video. it's low rez and quick!

Some feedback from our 1.7 customers.

First of all from Rick: 

Hi Bill,
Firstly they fit into our decor a treat - the off-white/black frames are just right.
My wife actually likes them ...rather elegant!

Not too much time to listen critically yet but as you suggested the 40W tube amp has lovely mids/highs but runs out of steam at moderate ++ sound levels.
A muscle amp will now be on the wish list.

Thanks again for a great product and service!

Regards,
Rick

 And from David:

Dear Bill,

I have been living in a state of musical ecstasy. It is so profound it's embarrassing. I want to thank you for a wonderful demonstration of the Magneplanar 1.7's (especially Nils Lofgren) a fortnight ago, and now that I'm breaking them in and getting the positioning just right, I see what all the fuss is about.

I am astounded at the level of musical beauty and fidelity offered by this company and I now wonder why I have waited so long to find this out? It's not that my other gear was deficient but this Magneplanar experience is a whole new world of pleasure.

When your favourite music is presented to you in a sublime acoustic, with all the usual nuances plus a delightful mixture of brand-new sounds and emphases-as recorded-then you tend to wallow in the sweet spot for hours in a lather of delight. I find I can listen to any music like this, and rediscover my collection as well. My favourite music suits the strengths of the speaker very well indeed. And talk about truth in reproduction of voices.

More specifically it is an emotional experience for me as I am dreaming of times past and other related musical triggers every time I listen. This is the exact opposite of ‘critical listening' (the critical brain listening for whatever is missing or maladjusted). I'm just enjoying myself and I don't really care about the system until the music is over. I'm not ‘listening', I'm hearing-perceiving-experiencing all at once. How relaxing is that?

While of course the opportunity for fine-tuning or upgrading of the system exists, it's for me by analogy like the experience of being able to have the very best home-cooked food. Yes, it isn't the world's best cuisine, but you yearn for the comfort of this food and the wonderful taste, especially with great ingredients and expertise(it's no surprise that I love tasty peasant cooking mostly, as do most great chefs personally). This is how I am experiencing my music (and system) now; it seems naturally right. If perception is mostly in the brain then my brain is now able to have a good rest from the effort of decoding musical or hi-fi signals. I only ever heard this on Quad ESL-63's before but I didn't own those. Thanks to the Aussie dollar and you, that musical problem has been solved recently.

It's your fault that I have fallen asleep in front of my system for many nights now because I can't tear myself away! I hope you are racked with remorse for interfeering with my well-ordered life like this.

Keep on doing what you're doing. I'm happy with your efforts.

Best Wishes,

David
 

Below is an excerpt from Jonathon Valins AVGuide ‘pre' Review

You can read it in full in the Magnepan review section of our site...

What makes the 1.7 such a landmark-and a departure-is that every driver in it, from its super-tweeter panel to its tweeter/upper mid panel to its lower-mid/bass panel-is a quasi-ribbon, making this the first Magneplanar to use ribbon technology in ALL of its drivers. The speaker's crossover has also been carefully re-done, as has its "enclosure" (the 1.7s use a stiffer aluminium-and-MDF frame rather than Maggie's traditional all-wooden one). The result is a speaker of superior "uniformity"-a speaker's whose power-handling, dispersion, resolution, and overall presentation are more "of a piece" than ANY previous Maggie design. (This does not mean, BTW, that the 1.7 will outdo its bigger brothers in some critical areas. Maggie's true ribbon tweeter, taken on its own, remains a superior transducer, and the considerably larger planar-magnetic mid/bass panels in the 3.6 and 20.1 simply produce "bigger," fuller, deeper bass than the smaller quasi-ribbon bass panel in the 1.7)

Frequency response of the 1.7 is said to range from 40Hz-24kHz (which the eagle-eyed among you will note is not all that different than the frequency response of the 1.6). Its sensitivity is rated at 86dB/500Hz /2.83v. Its impedance is 4 ohms. All of which means that, like the 1.6 and every other Maggie, the 1.7 will take some power to drive, although how much power depends on the size of your room, the kind of music you listen to, and the levels you are comfortable listening at. At the moment I am driving the 1.7s with the most transparent amps I've heard-the $115k Soulution 700s-coupled (via Tara Labs Zero and MIT Oracle MA-X) with the best preamps I've heard-the Audio Research Reference 5 and Audio Research Reference 2 Phono-and fed by the best sources I've heard-the Walker Proscenium Black Diamond Mk II record player with Da Vinci Reference Grandezza Mk II cartridge and the "Level 5" United Home Audio TASCAM 15ips, two-track tape deck playing back fabulous second-generation mastertapes from The Tape Project. At a later point I will switch over to the ARC 610Ts, the Technical Brain amp and preamp, the BAlabo amp and preamp, and to much, much, much more affordable electronics from Odyssey, but for the nonce let it be clear that I could happily live with the 1.7s in a system that is as ultra-high-end as the one I'm using. THAT's how good they are.

Appearances to the contrary, I'm not going to write an entire review at this point. I will save the issues of dipolar line-source speakers versus monopole point-source speakers, frequency response, distortion, etc. for another day. But I do want to make some initial observations about the 1.7s' sound:

1)    First, yes, they are audibly and substantially more coherent than previous Maggies-more of a piece top-to-bottom than the 1.6s, the 3.6s, and the 20.1s.

2)    Yes, the addition of the super-tweeter has greatly improved the treble over that of the 1.6s-more air, more detail, more transient speed, more bloom. But, be aware, that played very very very very loudly (and I'm talking well above100dB+ SPL peaks) that tweeter can turn bright in the upper mids, although I'm not at all sure, at this point, whether this is a panel-excursion issue or an amplifier-running-out-of-steam issue. The quasi-ribbon bass is improved, too, in resolution and dynamics, although I wouldn't say it goes much deeper than that of the 1.6s (at least, not in my room)--quite solid and flat down into the  40s. I believe the bass panel can also be overdriven at very very very loud levels.

3)    Yes, as I just implied, the 1.7s will play loudly more eagerly than the 1.6s, although they still may not be the ideal stadium rock speaker. More importantly from my point of view, they will also play more convincingly at low-to-moderate levels than the 1.6s (or any Maggie I've heard). Like their newfound coherence, this is a major departure from previous Maggies. While they sound progressively more room-fillingly realistic as you turn the volume up to a lifelike level, they do not sound anaemic dynamically at lower volumes nor do they seem short of bass or treble.

4)    They image better than any Maggie I've ever heard. I assume this may be a side-benefit of the uniformity of drive, dispersion, and power-handling of the all-quasi-ribbon complement of drivers (and it may have something to do with the addition of the separate super tweeter, too), but the "mouth-as-big-as-a-bass drum" effect of many previous Maggies is...gone. While they still have lifelike size of image (at lifelike volumes), the focus of the images is VASTLY improved-almost to the level of something like the point-source Magico M5, which is a paragon of imaging.

5)    Their soundstaging is simply the best I've heard from a dipole. With the right source (like The Tape Project's dub of Reference Recordings' Arnold Overtures-horrible music, great sound-or the superb Philips LP of Richard Rodney Bennett's terrific Piano Concerto), your jaw will drop when you hear the way these relatively demure panels fill the back third of your room with precisely layered, minutely detailed, incredibly deep, wall-bustingly wide sound.

6)    They are considerably higher in resolution at low, moderate, and high SPLs than the 1.6s, from top to bottom. Though I wouldn't say they are as transparent to sources or as finely detailed as, oh, the Martin Logan CLXes (nothing is) or M5s, they are nonetheless very finely detailed and transparent. Save in the bottom octave or octave-and-a-half, you aren't going to miss much if anything with these little numbers.

7)    They are intoxicatingly realistic. There is something about Maggies that simply sounds like the real thing, particularly in the midrange, particularly on voices. Maggies aren't the only speakers that have this supreme gift (Magicos have it, too-in spades--and so do CLXes). But some combination of neutrality, coherence, transient speed, image size, dispersion, dimensionality and bloom, and resolution of texture has always made Maggies sound more real than a large percentage of their competition. Here-with the right recordings, at the right levels-that realism (at least in the midband) is very nearly as close as I've come to the absolute sound in my listening room, and simply unmatched for a speaker at this price point (or, really, anything even remotely close to its price point).

Various finishes available, please check availability of colours at time of ordering:

$2,999 in a standard black grill speaker cloth

 $3,199 in a deluxe black or white grill cloth with silver or black aluminium styles 

$3,299 in a deluxe black or white grill cloth with your choice of black, natural oak or deluxe cherry timber side trim inserts

Interestingly the 1.7's have been recomended by The Absolute Sound Magazine in systems above US $40,000.

The other speakers that were in this recomended system were Quad 2905's at US$12,000 and Magico V2 US $18,000 respectively. 

Please note domestic freight varies by your location and will be quoted at time of ordering.