Magnepan 2.7i Panel Speaker

Speakers that disappear, so all that's left is the music.

FutureAudiophile praised its "strikingly spacious sound and a strong sense of envelopment" by the music.

Dagogo noted "excellent deep space behind the speakers" with precise placement of individual instruments.

Most speakers are boxes with drivers bolted to the front — and no matter how good the box is, you can still hear a bit of "speaker" in the sound. The 2.7i takes an entirely different approach: a thin, flat diaphragm radiating sound from both the front and back of the panel, with no cabinet at all to color or box in the sound. The result is a genuinely different kind of soundstage — wide, deep, and three-dimensional in a way that conventional cone speakers usually can't match.

Both the bass and midrange sections use Magnepan's quasi-ribbon design — aluminum foil bonded directly to the Mylar diaphragm you can see through the fabric grille — while the True Ribbon tweeter takes it a step further, with the foil suspended freely rather than mounted to a substrate at all. That's what gives the 2.7i its signature clean, extended top end and startling resolution: you'll hear differences in recordings and gear that lesser speakers simply smooth over. It's an entry point into genuinely reference-level sound from a company that's been perfecting this exact technology since 1969.

If you've never heard what a speaker sounds like with the cabinet taken out of the equation, this is where to start.