Al Sekela arranged for a factory tour at Magnepan for his friend Mark Balkowitsch and myself. Mark owns and operates Audio Perfection, which is on South Lyndale, just north of Interstate 494 (just in case your in the Twin Cities). Al and his wife were in town for a few days attending a conference. It was decided that the three of us would meet at Magnepan, in White Bear Lake MN, on a rainy Friday afternoon.
Magnepan's entrance consists of a coat closet and a waiting room that is set up as a small listening room. Since I beat the other two there, I got to listen to the waiting room pair of Magneplanar model MMG speakers. They sounded great playing music from the local classical FM station. The MMGs are only available factory direct for $550 per pair! It is clear the idea here is to get listeners hooked into the Maggie sound, then lead them to the dealers when they want to upgrade. From what I heard the MMGs (Mini-MGs) are worth every penny they charge. They are a two-way Quasi Ribbon/Planar magnetic speaker, so it is the same technology used in their MG12/QR, MG1.6/QR, and MGMC1 (MC = Multi Channel) speakers; just on a smaller scale. They are 14.5" wide and 48" tall. I am looking for an excuse to buy them...which small room in my house needs tunes?
Our tour guide was Steve Winey, who is Magnepan's inventor Jim Winey's son. Steve first showed us the machine that forms the panel frame routed out of a single piece of wood. Years ago this machine replaced the original method of gluing 28 different pieces of wood together to form the frame. The machine takes up an entire room, is fully paid for, and I'm sure has a major contribution to the Magnepan value. We also saw how the plastic film is stretched at varying tensions so that there is a varying natural resonance from top to bottom. This helps keep the speaker from barking on one particular note.
Steve (left) is showing Al and Mark (far right) the process in which the magnet wire is glued to the plastic film. Steve told us that Donna (background) prefers this job over all other process stations in the factory. As a result Donna has glued on the wire and foil on 95% of all Maggies ever made in the last 20 years. So if your Maggies are still holding together, you have Donna (and 3M Super77 Spray Adhesive) to thank for it.
Next we walked past a batch of half built MGCC2 center channel speakers. Steve talked about the many challenges that needed to be overcome designing a curved planar speaker. We also got to see a raw frame to the top of the line MG20.1 that Steve heaved off of a cart for us to see up close. I don't know how he was able to lift it back up into place. Finished they weigh 125 lbs each.
The above picture is of me (goof ball on the left) with Steve in the test room. Every single Maggie made is burned in and run through a battery of tests in this room. The clipboards behind us are charted characteristics of each model to which the production models are compared against. In other words, quality control.
We got to spend at least a half an hour in Magnepan's listening room. We walked in on Jim Winey (founder/inventor) who was expecting us, and got to chat with him for a while. Jim seemed to be quite interested in multi channel audio that day.
After Steve and Jim went about their day, Magnepan's Marketing Manager, Wendell Diller, stuck around while we listened to some two channel and a really fun four channel recording. The room had set up four of the MGMC1 multi channel speakers that are designed to be attached to a wall thus giving the panel bass reinforcement on one side. This allows for a smaller panel to be used and still achieve 80 hertz. Of course a sub woofer was used (as is typical in a multi channel system) to cover the frequencies below 80Hz. Two channel sound was quite good, and the four channel Jazz bar Chesky recording was really fun to listen to.
Sitting in the "hot spot" is Mark Balkowitsch, behind him is Marketing Manager Wendell Diller. On the right is Al Sekela and over Al's shoulder is the left rear MGMC1 speaker in the listening room. I'm not sure if they were kidding us or not, but there was talk about having the MGMC1 speaker automatically swing out of the wall when music is present, and automatically fold back into the wall when not in use. Sounds like a really fun feature the A/V guys would love.
I brought up with Wendell the difficulties associated with amplifiers needing to drive the low impedance load the Magneplanar speakers offer, and he realizes that the 4 ohm load does become an issue sometimes. So I filled him in on my "ZEROs" autoformer solution.
Many thanks to Jim, Steve, and Wendell for the great factory tour, and to Al and Mark for allowing me to tag along.
Later on Al and I talked and we both would like to see Magnepan make a speaker as small as the MGMC1 (10" x 46"), but use the true ribbon tweeter, and incorporate a powered "cone in box" sub-woofer. This would work out for guys like me that want the better tweeter, deep bass, yet have a speaker that will still fit into my 14' x 16' listening room.
Paul Speltz
July 2002
