Alongside the Magico Q5, the Maggie MG 1.7–the successor to the speaker I have long considered to be the best buy in high-end audio, the Maggie MG 1.6–was the product I most looked forward to hearing at this year’s CES. Unlike some folks, Maggie doesn’t come out with a new improved model every year. In fact, it doesn’t come out with new improved models every decade. Thus, the 1.7–Maggie’s first “all-ribbon” (well, actually, all-quasi-ribbon) floorstander with quasi-ribbon bass, quasi-ribbon mid/tweet, quasi-ribbon super-tweeter, improved crossover (with higher-quality parts), and all-aluminum frame–was big news, especially considering that it costs a mere $100 more than the speaker it was replacing.
I am delighted but not a bit surprised to report that it is an unqualified success, both as a two-channel speaker and as a surround-sound speaker. (Maggie demo’d it as both with equal success.) Everything about the 1.7 is an improvement over the 1.6–and the 1.6 was anything but chopped liver. Here we have a $1995 speaker whose staging, focus, and low-level resolution are not just much better than that of its excellent predecessor but downright superb by any standard short of a CLX or an M5, with detailing in bass choirs that was so good it reminded me of the Maggie 1-Us (which had the most lifelike detail in the mid-to-upper bass I’ve ever heard). The 1.7s, at least driven by Bryston 28Bs, also have astonishing power in the low end, which seems to extend down to somewhere around 35-40Hz. When’s the last time you heard a sub-$2k speaker reproduce not just the pitch and timbre but the genuine growl of an electric bass? And the genuine size of an electric bass? This one does!
Like the Magico Q5s, the 1.7s was a shade dark in balance (maybe this was the largish room it was in or the Brystons), but that didn’t keep its top end from shining. This new Maggie has absolutely lovely treble (fully integrated with its mids and bass, BTW) and its high end did seem, as Maggie claimed, to have better dispersion than that of the 1.6s. I thought I detected a little added bite in the upper octaves in the room we listened in, but I’m not sure because I wasn’t familiar with some of the music being played. Moreover, the bit of bite wasn’t present on most cuts, so it might have been the digs (which were undamped) or the amps. I can tell you this with certainty: The 1.7 was wonderfully realistic on “Rainy Night in Georgia,” reproducing Captain Luke’s rumbly-grumbly voice with just the right about of bass and just the right about of baritone and genuinely lifelike presence.
In my opinion the 1.7 was clearly the most important introduction at this year’s show, simply because it offers truly lifelike sound at a price that most of us can afford. No, it doesn’t go as low as the bigger boys. No, it is not a Q5. But, brother, does it play well where it plays. So well, in fact, that It will be a strong contender for my Best of Show Award.
Tags: MAGNEPAN
By Jonathan Valin
I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.
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