Just got mine from Borders and put it together today. Borders only had the singles but they were selling 2 singles for the same price as a double. Pretty cool. So I get it home and immediately start the unpackaging process. First box, cut through the seals and opened it up. There was one half of the coolest sci-fi weapon begging me to get it out of there. I took it out and the coupler and allen wrench. I already knew about having to adjust the coupler to make sure both sabers line up. No big deal at all. I take out the battle damaged end cap with the crystal (very cool touch), added my triple a's and attached the coupler. I then went to work on the second box. Took off the crystal cap, added the batteries and attached it to the coupler. First thing I noticed was it being 7 feet long was not a good idea to have it near a rotating ceiling fan. Nothing happened, but you can imagine. :)
Then the moment of truth. Turned both knobs and whooosh!! They both fired up no problem. The blade is definitely thicker that older gen sabers. And the LED's are RED!! Very nice blade work. The handle rivals Mace's in my opinion in looks and sheer coolness. A nice metal feel over the entire handle. And when the coupler is added, gives it some nice weight to it too. VERY cool handle. Movement sensors and clash sensors seem to work nice and accurate with fast responses. Power up and down seem timed perfectly to the lights. I would only say 2 negatives on my review. One are the power switches. I'm 50-50 with these. They are cool cause they're different from the other sabers, but at the same time you can't really pull of the one handed ignition of both blades like Maul did in the movie. How cool would that be? I don't have any suggestions on how they could have fixed that. It just would have been cool to do. Not a big flaw at all though. The actual sound quality however is not exactly as full as I'd like it. When fired up it does sound like it's coming from an am radio. True the speakers are small and can only handle so much frequency, but listen to your other sabers Vader, Anakin, etc. You'll know what I'm talking about.
All in all those 2 negatives in no way out weigh the positives or coolness of this piece. This is definitely one of my favorites. I would give it a 9 1/2 out of 10 points all together. Just for the fact that it's Darth Maul and it's FX are HUGE points in my book. I say WAY TO GO MASTER REPLICAS!! You knocked this one out of the park. Now let's hope I feel the same way about the Obi-Wan I'm so looking forward to.
This was my first review and I hope I gave some insight and was somewhat helpful to some of you? Just my 2 cents.