Ki---do you know John Elison??? He was helping to man the April Music room last year with his PC and Stello DAC! Glad someone like Simon Lee thought as highly of those mini-maggies as I did. There have been several quotes I've heard, besides my own, that have really floored me. Such as in the mini-review on Soundstage.com where an owner of a pair of the 20.1's proclaimed, "I wish mine sounded as good as these mini-maggies!". Magnepan certainly has a predicament here because although they do SOUND LIKE 10-100k speakers (and believe me at the show those were all there as you know), they certainly can't price them too high where people will laugh or too low where nobody would ever buy the other speakers in their product line!!!!
Steve---you are spot on with your assessment of adding "more" of them in an array. IMHO, the REASON they sounded so good was BECAUSE they were so small. Kind of like the long standing theory that "mini-monitors image better then large floorstanders"---thats EXACTLY what was going on there. You could stand up, sit down, be on axis, off axis, stand on your head, it didn't matter---they imaged like NUTS! They did not have the "beaming effect" that I hear with so many Maggies and electrostats and this, IMHO, was because they were so small!
Ben---nothing makes a 100k pair better then a 3k pair of speakers. Magnepan just proved that at CES. In reality, these will be priced max around 2.5k, and that will include at least 1 "woofer panel". Wendell said he really didn't want to make them cost more then the 1.6's and those are $1700 right now. A single woofer panel that is needed with these mini-maggies is $500. So, max you have $1700 plus $500=$2200.
Well, this 2.2k pair of speakers just beat everything at the show (IMHO), regardless of cost (they sounded waaaay better then the self proclaimed YG Acoustics "Best Loudspeaker in the World". This Maggie demo proved once again in my mind that in high end audio "you don't always get what you pay for."!
My guess on Specs are that the speakers with at least 1 woofer (preferrably 2) they will go from 40Hz-40kHz. Remember, they are using the ribbon from the 20.1 and that one goes out that far. And the woofer panel, according to Wendell Diller, is good to 40Hz as long as it is near a room boundary. As for filling a room with sound? The room this demo was in was about 30 feet long and 20 feet wide and 10 feet tall (in other words, BIG). The room was filled EFFORTLESSLY. I doubt your room is that big, so you should be fine.
Hope that helps.
Joel