I've owned both, and sell yet another planar.
I'll assume we're talking about hybrid Martin Logans, and leaving out the sadly discontinued CLS.
In general, the Martin Logans have a bit better detail and better imaging. The Maggies have better coherence and are more forgiving, and give you a wider sweet spot. The Martins have deeper bass (assuming good speaker/room interface - more on that later), while the Maggies tend to have better pitch definition in the bass region. The Prodigy and Odyssey had very good woofer/panel integration for a hybrid, with their innovative cardioid-pattern woofer system. I haven't heard the Summit. Electrostats are pretty much always a difficult load. The Maggies are an easier load (resistive 4 ohms) but their low efficiency (lower 80's) means you need lots of power.
If you peruse online evaluations, you'll find pretty consistent descriptions of the Maggies but a rather wide range of descriptions of the Martin Logans. The reason is the Maggies have fairly uniform radiation characteristics so their tonal balance doesn't vary a lot from room to room. Not so with the Martins - the panel approximates a line source, and the woofer a point source. Sound pressure level falls off more slowly with distance from a line source - specifically, at 3 dB per doubling of distance with a line source, and 6 dB per doubling of distance with a point source. So with the Martins, the relative loudness of woofer and panel at the listening position is dependent on room size and listening distance. If your room is too small for that particular model, the bass will be too prominent and may sound sluggish; if the the room is too big, the bass may be weak and the speaker may sound bright and forward. In either case, adjusting the placement of speakers and/or listeners will improve the tonal balance. I suspect that on-line accounts of Martin Logans having too much bass or too little bass come from setups where there was a gross mismatch between speaker size & room size.
Maggies and Martin Logans are both lovely loudspeakers, and in my opinion way ahead of the typical cones and domes in a box they compete with. If you're unable to listen to either, then here's my overgeneralized synopsis: The Martins are better sound for one person sitting in the sweet spot, while the Maggies are better sound for several people at once.
Duke
I'll assume we're talking about hybrid Martin Logans, and leaving out the sadly discontinued CLS.
In general, the Martin Logans have a bit better detail and better imaging. The Maggies have better coherence and are more forgiving, and give you a wider sweet spot. The Martins have deeper bass (assuming good speaker/room interface - more on that later), while the Maggies tend to have better pitch definition in the bass region. The Prodigy and Odyssey had very good woofer/panel integration for a hybrid, with their innovative cardioid-pattern woofer system. I haven't heard the Summit. Electrostats are pretty much always a difficult load. The Maggies are an easier load (resistive 4 ohms) but their low efficiency (lower 80's) means you need lots of power.
If you peruse online evaluations, you'll find pretty consistent descriptions of the Maggies but a rather wide range of descriptions of the Martin Logans. The reason is the Maggies have fairly uniform radiation characteristics so their tonal balance doesn't vary a lot from room to room. Not so with the Martins - the panel approximates a line source, and the woofer a point source. Sound pressure level falls off more slowly with distance from a line source - specifically, at 3 dB per doubling of distance with a line source, and 6 dB per doubling of distance with a point source. So with the Martins, the relative loudness of woofer and panel at the listening position is dependent on room size and listening distance. If your room is too small for that particular model, the bass will be too prominent and may sound sluggish; if the the room is too big, the bass may be weak and the speaker may sound bright and forward. In either case, adjusting the placement of speakers and/or listeners will improve the tonal balance. I suspect that on-line accounts of Martin Logans having too much bass or too little bass come from setups where there was a gross mismatch between speaker size & room size.
Maggies and Martin Logans are both lovely loudspeakers, and in my opinion way ahead of the typical cones and domes in a box they compete with. If you're unable to listen to either, then here's my overgeneralized synopsis: The Martins are better sound for one person sitting in the sweet spot, while the Maggies are better sound for several people at once.
Duke