Incredible imaging. Huge soundstage. Vocals second to none.

You will need a sub for really low bass.

Unbelievable sound stage, vocals so incredible you would swear they were standing in the room with you.

not really a weakness, but at low volume levels they sound .....well, average

First off, these speakers are 12-13 years old. They are completly orignal, right down to the tweed grill coverings.
I bought these from the orignal owner and they were well taken care of. When I got them I have to admit I was more impressed with their size than anything else. I remember saying to myself, I cant wait to show these to my friends
they will be so impressed! I got them home and hooked them up and right away I knew there was alot more to these speakers than their looks. I had a set of Bose am-5 speakers before which still sound great but I cant believe the huge difference in sound the maggies made. It was really night and day difference. Well, okay you have to say yea..... the Bose are running 2 inch speakers in those tiny little cubes and the maggies are 6 ft by 2 ft! well look at it this way. My Bose speakers were 2-3 years old max. The maggies are 13 years old!!! They use speaker technology that is over a decade old, and they sound like they were built last week. I went out looking at other speakers that were in a working mans budget and nothing come close. I even listend to a pair of Martin Logan (at $5000) and dont get me wrong, they do sound good but they were a little bright for me and the transition between the woofer and the electrostatic panel did not blend very well.The maggies use a magnaplanar panel to cover all the freq. and in my opinion do a better job of it.As far as impressing friends, people just cant belive what they hearing (and looking at).Even at their given size they sound much bigger and they seem to disapear in the soundstage. You know the sound is coming from the speaker but your mind plays tricks on you and it seems like the wall is making the sound not the speaker. I just upgraded to a Sunfire stereo amp and the maggies have come to life even more. At 300 wpc, they perform stress free and seem to be willing to take more! If you have the room for these, do not hesitate to buy these speakers if you get the chance. Even though they are only an inch or two thick, they still need space to work properly. At least two to three feet behind and to the sides of them. When you are not listening to them, you can push them to the wall. Which does'nt happen very often in my house.

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This is my first planar speaker

Some time ago I had submitted a opinion on the Magneplanar MG-2c's. The reason for updating this is a new pair of speaker wires. These cables are the Cardas Golden Cross. I must submit to all who own Maggies, that they have not heard these wonderful speakers until they have auditioned them with the specified Cardas cables. The Cardas cable has allowed the magic that these speakers posess to be truthfully conveyed to the listener. Do enjoy!!!

I bought a pair of these units predecessor (MG-II) in 1977 as part of a general upgrade to the system I had. I wish I still had them. In my experience, these speakers are the only ones that I have owned that reproduced the sound of a piano so well that, if you were in the next room, it sounded like a real piano was playing in the room with the speakers. (I have had various models of B&Ws and currently have Joseph RM 7si signatures.) That feat was accomplished without fancy interconnects or speaker cables. The speaker was powered by a Dyna Stereo 400, with the front end bypassed and a Dyna PAT-5 preamp with replacement op-amps. (Of course the source was vinyl.) I can only imagine what they sound like with today's electronics. Like tubes and vinyl, these speakers score in the midrange. Their bass is extremely well-damped (better than any cone speaker I have heard), but, alas, doesn't do much below about 50 Hz. And they probably don't offer the last word in top-end detail, compared to today's metal dome tweeters. What they offer is a fabulous midrange, complete transparency and a great sense of front-to-back placement. Being dipole radiators, they also don't offer the last word in pinpoint imaging.Their needs are their drawbacks. 1. They need 5-6 feet of free space behind them and an equal distance from the sidewalls. Putting them in a corner or against the backwall destroys the beautiful soundstage and mucks up the sound quality. 2. They need lots of watts. The 200 wpch I fed them seemed about right in a medium-sized room. Even then, they don't play at stomach-socking levels. 3. They're about 6 feet tall, and you shouldn't put anything in front of them. So they dominate the room visually. On the other hand, being panels -- rather than point sources -- they don't follow the inverse square law of loudness. (What that means is that they don't sound appreciably louder close up than at a distance.)
Fixing the bass problem might be accomplished with a suitably well-damped ("fast") subwoofer like the REL or the ACI Titan. I ran a 12" "acounstic suspsension" passive subwoofer with them (the only thing available at the time) that I never could get to sound right with classical music, although the additional bass "bloom" that it added was ok on jazz and welcome on rock. It was just too underdamped. I expect that one would get similarly bad results from some of the powered subs that I have heard from Velodyne, Klipsch and Sunfire that, to my ears, favor bass quantity over quality.
Bottom line: if you have a medium-sized room without out a lot of furniture filling up every square foot of floor space -- maybe in an old apartment building with high ceilings and plaster walls -- these things will put the singer or the orchestra or the piano in the room with you. Rockers and bass freaks look elsewhere. You won't miss the extra loudness -- they'll play fine at average levels of 85 dB and sound really good at much lower levels -- and your neighbors won't complain if they don't share your taste in music.

Very accurate, especially vocals.

Need proper placement in room, which is not always practical.

Having only ever used bookshelf speakers, this is my first
foray into respsectable loudspeakers. Sound is very clear
and precise. Proper placement is an issue, but when you set
them up correctly, they really have a great soundstage.
I dont have any problems with lack af bass if they are setup
correctly, mids and highs are very good to my amatuer ears.
They never sound like they are working hard, it is just the music levels increase. My previous speakers just made alot
of noise at higher volumes. I would recommend Maggies to
anyone looking for accurate, good sounding speakers.