Magnepan MMG W Speakers

Magnepan MMG W Speakers Dark gray factory socks were just replaced. Comes with hardware to mount them with the wires facing up or down. Local pickup in the north side of Chicago. Magnepan MMG W The Magnepan MMG W looks like no other speaker I’ve auditioned -- it’s more like a window shutter than a speaker. The smallest panel that Magnepan makes, it still measures more than 3’ tall. But the MMG W’s most remarkable dimension is its depth, or thickness: just 1"! The speaker is covered in a nonremovable off-white cloth, and the panel’s outside edge is finished in oak. There isn’t a stand to speak of -- the W’s top and bottom have holes for brackets that are designed for wall mounting. Magnepan also sells a wall adjustment bracket to ease setup; it allowed me to mount the MMG Ws in my room without drilling holes in my walls. Instead of speaker binding posts, each MMG W has two wires that connect to the plus and minus connectors of your receiver. These wires are 2’ long, which is too short for most applications. I wish that Magnepan provided proper binding posts; I had to improvise with banana plugs to enable these speakers to be set up with my regular speaker cables. Planar-magnetic speakers are essentially dipoles, which move sound to the speaker’s front and rear. The moving part, or diaphragm, is a sheet of Mylar with wires applied to its surface. Permanent magnets beneath the surface of the Mylar attract or repel these wires, which causes the Mylar sheet to vibrate, which produces sound. This is called a quasi-ribbon driver -- it’s the wires that are conductive, not the Mylar itself. (In true ribbon drivers, which Magnepan uses in its more expensive speakers, a conductive aluminum ribbon is bonded to the Mylar instead of wires.) Because of the low mass of the Mylar sheet, planar-magnetic speakers are able to respond more quickly to an input signal and stop more quickly when the signal is gone, with little decay time compared to conventional cone speakers. In other Magnepan speakers, part of the Mylar sheet has thicker wires and part has thinner wires, which creates, essentially, woofer and midrange drivers. Not so with the MMG W -- its single-diameter conductor makes it a crossoverless, or one-way, design. Magnepan’s wall brackets have been cleverly designed. Once drilled into a wall, the brackets hold the panel in place with top and bottom pins that let you swivel the speakers out when listening, then swing them back against the wall when not in use. The bottom pin allows the connector wires from the panel to be threaded through, which results in a clean appearance.