There are two ways you can improve a speaker. The first is keeping it the same but making it larger and the second is to keep it the same but use improved parts and/or improve the over all structure. If we are to take a look at the history of the Magneplanar company it becomes instantly obvious that to them "upgrading" has always meant making things bigger. You start with the smg/mmg, move up to the 1 series, then the 2 series if you're still not happy, the 3 series for the "ultimate" ride and then end with 20's to have it all. (the tympanis used to be the "final" destination) Same frames, same drivers, same guts, just bigger, with the exception of how the tweeter is designed and used on some. I believe they chose that path for this reason. Lets say you have a speaker called the goat. If you then build the goat with better parts to make a new model, it doesn't make it new, it makes it the "norm" and makes the "old goat" just that, a lesser speaker looked down upon. I don't think Jim Winey (or anyone) would want any of their speakers put in that light. So they would all be the same, all use the same "economical" parts and better would simply be bigger. This is done not only for the above reasons, but mainly because it would simply be impossible to mass produce them like I do. The cost would be so prohibitive, they'd have gone out of business long ago. They make, for it's cost, one of the best buys in all audio. That said, the "bigger is better" slogan is a fallacy. Yes, it adds the the SPL which adds to the "alive-ness", but it can also over load the room, and it does nothing to address the real issue: Increasing efficiency. The fact is the size of the maggie driver has little to do with what notes it can hit, it only determines how many decibels it loads the room with, and how much current is required to drive it. So yes, a 3 series maggie will load a room with more decibels of a frequency, but it won't necessarily go any deeper. I know this because I have heard maggies so delaminated they only had 5 inches of wire attached in the middle, and they sounded exactly as if the wires were fully attached. On top of this the larger maggies can have a loss of intimacy and musicality the (I won't say smaller, I'll say more "normal" sized maggies) have, and they loose it at a price of requiring far more amplifier power to drive them, as well as the real problem of over loading the room. In my opinion bigger is the wrong way to go about making things better. With that in mind, what we do is based on our belief that at their hearts all maggie drivers are the same. That being the case it makes sense that if you found one crossover design that worked really well, then it would work best for ALL of them, and it should do so regardless of the size of the speaker. We feel the design of the SMGa XO comes closest to this ideal, and we base all our XO mods to other models on making them achieve as close a proximity to that model as we can. Maggies are unusual in that they are a single driver laminated with 2 voice coils which makes 2 seperate driver "areas" playing on a single driver. All our modded speakers use a 6dbl 1st order shared series XO, that makes the 2 "drivers" play as one, thus turning the panel into a single, large coherent driver, with all the sonic benefits that implies. During the 90's Magnepan changed much of what it had done before suddenly and without explanation, (turning the pole piece rearward, changing the XO's and moving the panels generally more vertical) and I believe (and this is only my belief) that they did this to compete in the ever growing home theater market at a time when they had as yet no such dedicated models. Doing these things makes their speakers beam more, which makes them seem more falsely dynamic and "brighter", things certain to appeal to the home theater shopper who knows nothing and gives 20 second auditions. One can't blame them for doing what they had to to survive, and doing it was a Rubicon they can't go back over now that they have dedicated HT models. However I consider the reversing of the pole piece a ruse and I re-install them forward as they should be. Why? What makes maggies special is the rear wave, and with the pole piece in the back the bass wave cannot escape as freely as it should resulting in a loss of bass, ambience and over all musicality. (some argue it's also better this way because of the magnets interaction with the mylar (push vs pull) but I tend to discount this) In any case, the vast majority of people when they hear it both ways prefer the pole piece front. We also install state of the art Duelund resistors on the quasi ribbon models to keep the quasi ribbon air, but remove it's glare. Attention to detail, understanding what a maggie speaker is and what it needs, and seeing it gets those things in the best and most pure way possible is what we are about. That doesn't happen by making it twice as big and calling it a day. After years of experimentations and trial and error I believe we have gotten the core perfomance ability to it's zenith. They equal and exceed other speakers in every area of resolution while doing it in a natural and engaging manner others cannot duplicate. There probably is no such thing as the perfect speaker, but with these modifications I think I've taken the design as far as it can go and I would put them up against anything. There's no longer a narrow sweet spot, you can sit and enjoy them anywhere in the room, the bass is deep and thunderous, the highs delicate and airy and the mids stat like. What's more you can play them for hours with no fatigue and yes, that includes rock too.