Ice,
Do you still have the magna's,I remember them and almost bought a pair! Instead I got a set of EV's interface series "C" which came with a fequency slope equalizer. This made a dramatic difference depending on the music you were listening to.
My buddy had a set of planars wayback but he prefered his KEF's over them,again music choice plays a big part. He drove them through a Tangent amp/pre setup that was fantastic,always wanted 1 of those but they were extremely limited.
The vegas were never my cup of tea but a few friends owned those,funny how they'd end up at my place to listen to the EV's.... 
these days I listen to an old set of Castles driven by an integra integrated amp. Still looking for a reasonably priced Thorens TT to play my vinyl on,passed 1 up atan auction last year,could have got it for $200 but it came with a complete system and the speakers were these accusound monsters that I didnt want to carry! Still kicking myself over that seeing the prices on ebay these days!
IMHO the 901's were the last quality piece made by bose and well those are about the same time frame as the magnaplanars,vegas and even my old EV's.
Choosing the proper equipment to drive the speakers is easily as important as the speakers themselves.
If you get it wrong, it will sound bad regardless of price or reputation.
I got rid of the magnaplanars simply because of the space requirements and the fact that the room configuration at my house was not going to allow for them to work as good as they can.
We had many of them at "Enlightened Technologies" back in the early 90s by buying them from super rich customers when we installed a new "home theater" much like Bill Murray's theater in "Zombieland" into thier houses.
Most of them were compromised by the room or installation.........or were missing treble ("mg-1" lacks the ribbon tweeters of the later models)...........or were driven by the wrong equipment.
We compared Bose 901 and the Magneplanars of the same vintage (no ribbon tweeter) with the 901s and it was a dead heat with the Bose having more options in "working with the room" to find a configuration that worked best.
We also added a piezo tweeter array and tried a few subwoofers with both and it really woke them up.
We drove both with a multitude of amps and the bose sounded best using the stock equalizer with a Harmon Kardon citation 22 amp while the Magneplanars preferred a yamaha B2 power amp using my dynaco preamp.
Both were unbelievably loud.
Bose is all about making high SPL and high fidelity with the smallest possible package.
They do this using well designed enclosures and driver configuration and then equalize them to smooth out the peaks and valleys of it's frequency response.
Then you must push quite a bit of power through them.
It's both brute force and finesse that they use to overcome the small size.
Most people don't run nearly enough wattage into 901s and then complain the bass is muddy because thier amp isn't strong enough to control the drivers properly.
Most of the older 901 equalizers have capacitors that are leaking which can cause the fluid they leak to degrade the traces as well as cause shorts.
I re-capped a 901 equalizer that sounded ok but had leaking caps and it really changed the sound for the better.
My 901s finally died when I plugged a Boss DS-1 pedal into the tape head input of a harman kardon A250 epic tube amp, turned it to 11, and pushed the tremolo bar down on an early Kramer focus 1000 ("holy grail" banana headstock) until it fed back at a super low frequency............from 40 feet away.
I saw blue powder on the floor around the speakers and found the foam had gotten brittle with age and been ejected from all of the drivers.
They still worked and sounded ok even missing the foam.....bizarre.
Sadly, I am left with only my dynaco equipment and am getting by on normal consumer gear at this point.
