Having spent many years with Magnapans, in a home environment with low ceilings and a small fixed listening area you do benefit from the reduced HF dispersion. Less early reflections off the floor and ceiling. The situation is entirely different than SR.
The big difference with the Magnaplanes is that it is a single element that acts as thousands of elements that are space infinitely close together. They are not separate drivers each radiating its own sound field So it acts as a single source in terms of radiation pattern (with the narrowing of the vertical pattern), so you don't have the interference of different drivers.
They do sound quite nice and work as intended.
The ribbon idea is the "perfect" line source. But they have problems getting loud enough or going low enough for large scale usage.
It is the physical spacing of the drivers that causes the problem in line arrays.
While it is possible to get a single box to behave properly, the problem starts when you add more boxes. It is simply more individual sources.
If a line array as made of up say 16 different boxes, each one producing a part of the waveform, with enough pattern control to not affect the others, you would have something.
But now, you do not have 1 box model # in inventory, you have 16, that MUST be put together in a specific way to have a system. And you can't vary that arrangement, or the coverage will suffer.
