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Magico M Project Loudspeaker

Magico M Project Loudspeaker

It’s been several years since I’ve had a Magico loudspeaker in my listening room. In the nonce other speakers have come my way—chiefly from the wonderful Danish company Raidho—that have pleased me as much as, or more than, the high-precision, aluminum-bodied, carbon-fiber-driver transducers from the Hayward, CA, company. But with the advent of the $129,000 Magico M Project that’s about to change.

Unfortunately, what I have to say about this truly remarkable speaker will only be immediately relevant to fifty very wealthy, very discerning, and very lucky people around the globe. You see, fifty is the number of M Pros that Magico committed to build when this tenth-year-anniversary project was announced last year—and as of this writing all but a handful of them have already been sold. In fact, most of these very-limited-edition items—intended to showcase Magico’s latest, most advanced thinking—were bought and paid for before the first M Pro was fabricated, a testament to the faith discerning listeners have placed in Alon Wolf, the brains behind a company that has gone from zero to one hundred in reputation, sales, and charisma in a decade.

While owning one of the M Projects is swell if you’re one of The Fifty, it does rather leave the rest of us in the lurch. And leaves a reviewer like me in a tough spot: Why bother to discuss a speaker that virtually no one can buy?

I asked Alon Wolf this very thing. Why limit access to a product this excellent and groundbreaking? Why not keep building M Pros on a custom-order basis?

Wolf’s first (less satisfying) answer was that exclusivity and pride of ownership were what he’d guaranteed the M Pro’s fifty purchasers, and he would not go back on his word to the men and women who’d forked out $129,000 purely on his promise that this was the best thing Magico could devise.

Wolf’s second (more satisfying) answer—and one of the two reasons I’m writing this review—was that many of the technologies showcased in the M Project have already found their way into other Magico speakers—the new Q7 Mk II that Robert will soon review and the S7 that is still a work in progress—and will shortly find their way into future models.

So…from a certain angle you should consider this a preview of Magico’s coming attractions.

But from another angle, it is also undoubtedly a vanity project—for the second reason I’m reviewing the M Project is entirely selfish. To be frank I would’ve reviewed any speaker that Alon Wolf (or Andy Payor, David Wilson, Jacques Mahul, Wendell Diller, Yoav Geva, Charles Von Oosterum, Michael Børresen, Alfred Vassilkov, Holger Fromme, Roland Gauder, and Juergen Reis, among others) said was his best effort, even if it were a one-off with no chance of progeny. We all have our hobbyhorses, and it’s no secret that ultra-high-end loudspeakers are one of mine.


Magico M Project Loudspeaker

As you know, I’ve been following the progress of this skyrocket of a company from the moment I first heard the original Mini in 2006. Since then, Magico has gone from titanium-sandwich drivers, ring-radiator tweeters, and stacked-birch enclosures to nanotech carbon-fiber drivers, beryllium dome tweeters, and massive aluminum enclosures to, as you will see, graphene carbon drivers, diamond-coated beryllium dome tweeters, and carbon-fiber-and-aluminum enclosures. What has stayed the same, however, is Wolf and Co.’s single-minded pursuit of perfection.

Of course, the first of many thorny issues with such a quest—which is certainly what Magico is on—is what is meant by “perfection.” For Magico the answer to this question is, and has always been, the lowering of distortions of every measurable kind. Every advance that the company has made has been accompanied by an audible reduction in noise (from drivers, crossovers, and cabinets) and a concomitant increase in resolution and transparency. For Magico, the perfect speaker would be no speaker (or no sense of one)—a pure, uncolored conduit from source to listening room.

This said, not everyone has loved Magico’s ultra-transparent, ultra-neutral, ultra-low-distortion sound (or bought into its pursuit of measurements-based perfection). Just recently our very own Alan Taffel voiced a complaint about the Magico Q Series speakers (while praising the more gemütlich S Series) that echoed a criticism others have made. Let’s face it: One man’s neutral, low in distortion, and transparent is another’s cool, lean, and analytical. And cool, lean, and analytical is precisely the way some listeners have heard Magico Qs.

To be fair to their critics, Magicos in general are not warm, cuddly, forgiving speakers, like Raidhos or Wilsons. They appeal, as I said in my review of the Q5, to listeners who value transparency to sources—or what others call “accuracy”—above all else. If a source is well recorded, Magico Q Series loudspeakers come as close to the real thing as any transducers on the market, now or in the past. If it is not, well, they tell you so—not in an overly insistent way, but nonetheless in a straightforward one.

I happen to like this kind of “just the facts, ma’am” honesty, but I’m in the minority. Most listeners, I think, prefer drama to documentary. They want a transducer that thrills them the way music—live or canned—thrills them, and could care less about how much coloration it takes to consistently deliver those goosebumps or how close the result comes to the sound of acoustic instruments in a real space. I call this (majority) group “as you like it” listeners, but it’s just as fair, and less faintly pejorative, to call them “musicality-first” ones.

In between the transparency and musicality listeners is the absolute sound contingent, whose search for those recordings and components that best preserve the sound of real acoustic instruments in a real space was the ideal upon which this magazine was founded. To an extent, both of the other streams feed into this central pool, albeit on a kind of a contingency basis. Transparency-first listeners are searching for the recordings and equipment that deliver the most convincing semblance of the real thing, too, provided that they don’t also turn sows’ ears into silk purses by grossly coloring the sound. Though they may not have an overriding interest in acoustic instruments played in a real venue (i.e., in classical music), musicality-first listeners are also delighted when something sounds “real,” because when something sounds “real” (while at the same time sounding beautiful and exciting) it just adds to the thrill quotient.

It has been my contention that no listener is purely one of these three types: that a delight in accuracy, musicality, and realism are common to all listeners, although one of these three “biases” tends to predominate (or at least it does most of the time).

 

The trouble is that it is next to impossible to find a single transducer that will please all three palates in equal measure. Accuracy generally comes at the price of lifelike power range/lower midrange warmth and fullness, tending to leave the upper-midrange and treble, where so much transient detail lives, more “exposed” (and audible); musicality generally comes at the price of an overly full midbass, power range, and lower midrange, increasing slam, density of tone color, and goosebumps, while also, typically, reducing upper-midrange presence and brilliance and darkening the overall sound; the absolute sound is a standard that serves acoustic music recorded in an actual concert hall perfectly well, but is less applicable to electronic music recorded in a studio, meaning that fans of rock ’n’ roll (and they are legion) find its finely nuanced, venue-dependent, midrange-centric aesthetic considerably less than satisfactory.

So where does a lover of Béla Bartók, Ray Brown, and The Beatles go to get the essential piece/performance/venue/recording detail, the lifelike tone color, weight, and transient response, thrilling dynamic range (particularly in the bass), and sheer SPLs that each of these composers and musicians requires in significantly different proportions?

Alas, up until a few months ago I didn’t think there was a single-transducer answer to that question, though the Raidho D-5s would’ve come closest to getting my vote (with serious provisos). As I said at the start of this piece, my opinion has now changed.

In the next few pages, I’m going to tell you how and why I believe the Magico M Pro comes closer to meeting the acoustic challenges of different musics (and to satisfying the tastes of different listeners) than other speakers I’ve heard in my home, and the similarities and differences between it, previous Magicos, and other outstanding loudspeakers.

In advance of that, let me close this opening section with a bit of a teaser (and a conundrum): Though the M Project carries Magico’s high-transparency/low-distortion aesthetic to fresh new heights, in certain fundamental ways, it doesn’t sound like any other Magico I’ve ever heard.

I’ll let you chew on that (and doubtlessly let some of you chew me over anonymously, vigorously, and vengefully in our Letters section).

In the meantime, those of you who still think of me as Mr. Magico, bear in mind that I have not loved the Magico sound at recent trade shows and have said so (and caught flak for it), that I have repeatedly criticized the Magico beryllium tweeter (ditto), that I have not had a Magico loudspeaker in my listening room in better than three years, that I have praised any number of other transducers that aren’t made in Hayward, CA, and that my current references come from Aarhus, Denmark.

Let me also say that there are other speakers out there of great promise that I haven’t listened to at length or in my home. I can’t comment on them, because I don’t voice opinions about products I haven’t heard. But because I very much like the M Pro does not mean that I’ve stopped very much liking the Raidho D-5 or the Raidho D-1 or the MartinLogan CLX or the Quad 2905 or the Magnepan .7/1.7/3.7/20.7 or the Estelon X Diamond or the MBL 101 E or the MBL 101 X-Treme or the Avantgarde Zero-1 Pro or the Avantgarde Trio/Basshorn or the Magico Q5 or Q7 or Ultimate III, or a dozen others.

What’s the Same and What’s Different?
By sharing the following FFT, measured at my listening seat, I can show you in rough outline both what is the same and what is different about the M Project loudspeaker vis-à-vis previous Magico loudspeakers (Do understand that FFTs taken at a distance, as this one was, not only reflect the sound of the loudspeaker but also the effect of the room.)

Magico M Project Loudspeaker

What is the same here is the outstandingly flat frequency response from about 200Hz right through to 16kHz and above. I used only 1/24th octave smoothing on this graph, which is very close to no smoothing, and yet (as you can see) the speaker still appears to be extremely well behaved in the amplitude domain. The rise from about 200Hz down to 24.8Hz shows the effect of my room on the bottom octaves, but even here (and with, as noted, virtually no smoothing) the Magico M Project is still very well behaved, though this plateau in the bass and the subtle decline in the upper midrange and the treble (the drop above 16kHz is an artifact of my measurements), starting at about 1.6kHz, gives the M Project more of a “concert-hall” balance than the Magico Q-5, whose frequency response was slightly elevated from about 500Hz to 6kHz and less prodigious in the bottom octaves (in part because it has smaller and fewer woofers).

Though Magico claims that the M Project doesn’t measure substantially differently than its other speakers—and on a global level this is clearly true—on a local level the differences I just noted are there to see. More importantly, they are there to hear, for (as I just told you) the M Pro simply doesn’t sound like its Q or its M or its S brethren—or at least it doesn’t sound like them when it comes to tonality. Oh, it has the same standard-setting low-level resolution of timbres and textures and the same lightning reflexes with transients as the Q Series speakers—and even lower distortion—but overall it is substantially fuller, richer, darker, and more powerful than the Qs, making for a presentation that is far more likely to appeal to musicality-first listeners, without entailing any sacrifices that would limit its appeal to Magico’s classic audience—the transparency-to-sources and absolute sound crowds. Indeed, the M Pro’s appeal to both of the latter has only increased, thanks to its denser and more lifelike tone color.

How has Magico accomplished this? Not, as you might reasonably suppose, by changing its approach to designing or voicing speakers. Magicos are still engineered entirely by numbers. Parts are not chosen strictly because they “sound better” (although they are most certainly listened to at length), but because they test better, reflecting Magico CEO Alon Wolf and CTO Yair Tammam’s unshakeable conviction that measurably lower distortion literally equals audibly higher performance. However, while Magico’s design and engineering approach has not changed in the M Project, key parts and pieces have.

Let’s start with the tweeter. In so far as I’ve had issues with previous (post-M5) Magico loudspeakers it’s been with its 1″ beryllium dome tweeter first and foremost. This tweeter, which replaced what I thought was the exemplary implementation of the Scan-Speak ring radiator in the late, lamented M5, has bothered me since I first heard it. It is, in a word, bright (to be fair, all beryllium dome tweeters sound bright to my ears). Now this brightness can be greatly ameliorated by adjusting toe-in, as Magico recommends, so that the tweeters are aimed at your shoulders rather than at your nose or ears. Thus configured, the treble is highly livable, though not nearly as sweet and liquid, IMO, as something like Raidho’s wunderbar sealed ribbon (which is one of the big reasons why I switched over to Raidhos). Even with proper toe-in, the tweet still seems to me to be a weakish link in an otherwise superb (and superbly measuring) design. (There is another, related issue—which I’ve already touched on—that we will come to momentarily.)

In the M Project, the beryllium dome tweeter has been replaced. For the top end, Magico is now using a diamond-coated beryllium tweeter that has “optimized geometry,” an improved motor system, an improved back chamber, and, at 28mm, a 2mm larger diameter than the 26mm beryllium tweeter previously used in the Q Series loudspeakers. While a mere 0.1″ larger diameter might not sound significant, it is in fact a critical difference, because it allows the tweeter to play lower into the upper midrange without distortion (thus allowing Magico to lower the crossover point between it and the midrange driver—and simplify the crossover). According to Magico the larger diameter also allows the tweeter to play louder with lower distortion, improves treble dispersion, and eliminates the need for a Gundry dip to disguise the crossover point.

The 6″ midrange driver of the M Pro is also substantially different. For one thing, it uses an entirely different kind of carbon—called graphene—that is 30 percent lighter and 300 percent stiffer than the nano-tube carbon used in the Q Series midrange. (Magico claims this is the first commercial use of this new material.) In addition to its substantially lighter, stiffer diaphragm, the new midrange has a vented titanium voice coil and an underhung neodymium motor system capable of what Magico claims is a “perfectly stabilized” 1.7 Tesla magnetic field. With +/-6mm of excursion, the new midrange is said to be capable of 120dB distortion-free SPLs. With its higher sensitivity and lower distortion—and the lower crossover point (and less complex crossover) permitted by the new tweeter—the new midrange doesn’t have to work as hard into the treble, thus improving resolution, enriching timbre, and eliminating any dispersion mismatches near crossover.

 

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned another issue some have had with Q Series speakers, which exacerbated the treble “problem.” That issue was the way the Q5 handled the bass and power range.

On paper, the Q5 was absolutely exemplary in these oh-so-critical areas—almost ruler-flat in the measurements I took. But in practice, those exemplary measurements didn’t translate into consistently satisfying performance for some listeners on some kinds of music.

I’m going to make an argument here that Magico isn’t going to like, but that I believe needs to be stated to justify the reservations that certain listeners have had about Magicos. The problem with great-on-paper measurements is that they don’t always translate into great sound with all music, and here is why: The ear/brain doesn’t hear the way a measurement microphone attached to a computer does. When it comes to amplitude (and everything else) a microphone/computer hears everything equally well—its “hearing” is near-perfectly flat. The response of our ear/brain, however, is not perfectly flat. (Nor is music a “steady-state” phenomenon like a test signal.) As listeners we are less sensitive to sounds in certain frequency bands and more sensitive to those in others. (This is one reason why concert halls—the best of them—have the acoustic balances they have.)

The problem with flat-measuring bass, at least in part, is that (at less than thunderous volumes) we aren’t as sensitive to bass frequencies as we are, to say, presence range ones. As a result, a speaker that measures flat in the bass and elsewhere can sound somewhat “bass-shy” at normal listening levels (depending, of course, on the engineering of the source).

When you combine this flatter-measuring bass (often associated with sealed-box enclosures, such as the ones that Magico has always used) with lower sensitivity (also a characteristic of sealed-box speakers), you can end up with a situation where, on certain kinds of music (particularly rock ’n’ roll) and certain kinds of recordings (particularly less-than-great ones), the bass not only sounds less full, powerful, and impactful than it does in life at normal listening levels, but also where it takes tremendous amounts of current simply to get that bass “out of the speaker” and into the room. (One reason that Magico speakers have always fared so well with Soulution amplifiers is that Soulutions are capable of delivering astounding amounts of current. They are also inherently fuller sounding in the bass and power range, which is another big plus.)

To put this concisely, part of the reason that past Magicos have sounded a bit brightish (or sterile or analytical or cold—choose your own slur) to some listeners is because their leaner, harder-to-generate, more “correct-on-paper” bass left their presence, brilliance, and treble range more “exposed”—at least on some kinds of music.

Now, save occasionally, I haven’t had issues with Magicos’ bass. But then I listen to a lot of classical music and acoustic pop. Most listeners do not. Most of you listen to a lot of rock, and on rock music, the problem gets crystalized almost immediately as a touch of leanness and a reduction of “slam.” (Lest I’m leaving the impression that the Q Series loudspeakers are one big mass of problems, let me very quickly remind you that I lived happily with Q5s and, before them, M5s, and, before them, Minis and Mini IIs as my references for many years. For a listener like me—who prizes fidelity and realism—Magicos came and come closer to ideal transparency than any other loudspeakers. Having said this, I want to make it clear that I do understand why for listeners who aren’t like me—who want the super-dense color and big bass impact of rock on all music, no matter how absurdly unrealistic a “slamming” cello may sound—Magicos haven’t always been the ticket.)

Happily, Magico has also addressed the bass “issue” in the M Project; indeed, it started to address this issue in its original Q7 loudspeaker.

M Project Bass
As I showed you via my FFT in the last part of this review, the M Project has, in-room, a stronger and more plentiful bass and power range than its predecessors. What I haven’t yet talked about is the quality of that bass/power-range response which, in my experience, is simply unparalleled in clarity, definition, and (for lack of another descriptor) start-and-stopability. Now, I’ve heard the bass/power range reproduced with as much (or more) impact as that of the M Project. I’ve also heard the bass/power range reproduced with as much (or more) color. But, in all my days in this hobby, I’ve never heard a more natural and transparent low end from a full-range dynamic loudspeaker. Listening to the bass and lower midrange through the M Project is like hearing those octaves with surtitles of the score projected above them. Every note is as distinct as it sounds in a concert hall.

I don’t want to resort to cliché here, but the truth is that I do hear things in the bottom end that I’ve never heard before—and I’ve heard them on every single cut I’ve played. Fender bass ostinatos, such as the ones on “One Good Man” or “As Good As You’ve Been To This World” from Janis Joplin’s I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blue Again Mama [Columbia/Speaker’s Corner]—an album I must’ve listened to at least a hundred times—are no longer big, vague blocks of color, but a series of individual notes, as clearly defined as those of, oh, Sam Andrew’s lead guitar. Ditto for complexly orchestrated passages, such as the cello, doublebass, and percussion lines of the intensely busy and colorful Feria of Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole [RCA/Analogue Productions].

I want to emphasize that the M Project is in no way a skeletonized presentation, where transient clarity is being purchased at the cost of bass/power range color, power, and solidity. On the contrary, in my experience Magico has never before come closer to the rich timbre, physical presence, and sheer slam of the real thing. Neither is this density of color and visceral power being purchased at the cost of a huge peak in the heart of the midbass, followed by a steep roll-off below 50–60Hz, as is so often the case with even the best ported loudspeakers. These Magicos go low, but they go low without the fuzzbox furriness and midbass peakiness, the enclosure/driver/port ringing, that has the same effect on music as an unsteady hand has on the sharpness of a photographic image. Lower-octave notes simply don’t keep playing because of added enclosure/driver/port resonances. They start and stop the way notes do in a concert hall, cleanly and suddenly (it is, in fact, this dramatic suddenness that gives orchestral crescendos their “jump”). Thanks to this incredibly lifelike start-and-stopability, the M Project is the polar opposite of those speakers—and some of them are quite celebrated—that reproduce the dynamic/harmonic envelop as a blurry, indefinite smear.

I suppose that these virtues may be owed, in some part, to the serendipitous way the M Project’s three woofers match up with my room. But in the main, it is clearly owed to the woofers themselves—which are larger in diameter, more plentiful in number, and newer in design than those in the Q5—and to the enclosure in which they are ensconced, which is unique in the Magico line.

Like their predecessors, the three woofers in the M Project use Magico’s nanotube-carbon diaphragms, but those diaphragms are 1″ larger (10″ versus 9″) than the two woofers in the Q5, and they are mated to an entirely new magnetic motor system that is said to be capable of one-half inch of linear movement (for 120dB SPLs at 50Hz), while maintaining a very low inductance of less than 0.15mH. (The elimination of eddy currents in the magnets of dynamic drivers has been a hot topic lately, and the Magico woofs have apparently been designed to be very well behaved in this regard.)

As carefully engineered as these woofers are, I wonder if they would perform as well as they do in my room—and if the other drivers would behave as well as they do—were it not for the M Project’s unique enclosure. One of the things Magico has become famous for is the solidity of its boxes, which, since the advent of the Q Series, have been made of thick, CNC-milled, constrained-layer-damped, aircraft-aluminum plates. No other enclosures I know of pass the “knuckle-rap” test the way Magicos do—tapping them is like tapping a steel girder. As a result of their artful blend of mass, stiffness, and damping, the Magico Q Series boxes are, in all ways save one, virtually resonance-free, neither storing nor releasing any time-delayed energy at any frequency, as the waterfall plots that I printed in my review of the Q5 clearly showed.

What the waterfall plots did not show, however, and the one weakness of Magico’s otherwise standard-settingly inert enclosures, is how their necessarily squared-off shape affects dispersion, particularly in the treble. While the enclosures of other loudspeakers that I’ve loved, such as the Raidho D-5s, do store and release more energy, they play this problem off against the superior dispersion of their narrow, sculpted boxes. The use of such curves and tapers just isn’t feasible with aluminum enclosures, as aluminum (unlike the various other, more malleable materials used for speaker boxes) cannot be easily bent, bowed, cast, or molded into aerodynamically curved shapes. (Oh, it could be milled into a curve, I suppose, but the cost and weight of such panels would be staggering.)

 

The M Project is the first “statement” Magico (since the M5) that does not use an all-aluminum enclosure. It is also the first “statement” Magico with an aerodynamic shape.

How this has been accomplished without sacrificing the resonance-canceling blend of mass, stiffness, and damping of the all-aluminum boxes involves a neat (and costly) bit of engineering. The M Project enclosure has a newly designed curved shape that tapers gradually from front to back, eliminating the parallel walls and sharp, potentially diffractive edges of Magico’s traditionally “squared-off” aluminum boxes. Instead of employing thick aluminum plates for sidewalls, the M Project uses sidepieces of carbon fiber (one of the stiffest, strongest materials around). According to Magico, these curved carbon-fiber sidewalls minimize internal resonances and greatly reduce the amount of internal damping that is required. (The M Project enclosure still uses Magico’s elaborate aluminum-skeleton topology throughout its interior, to ensure absolute rigidity.)

In addition to its sideplates, the massive aluminum front and rear baffles have been milled into curves, while the equally massive (two-inch-thick) aluminum top and bottom plates have been CNC-machined to have edgeless contours. In other words, the M Project enclosure has been designed to have the lowest number of potentially diffractive surfaces of any statement Magico since the Mini and Mini II. It is also, far and away, the most beautiful looking Magico since the Mini and Mini II.

Judging from the sound, top to bottom, it is obvious that Magico’s incredibly expensive new box is a better idea. The phenomenal clarity in the bass and power range that I’ve remarked on, the unparalleled (in my experience) naturalness with which the drivers start and stop, and the remarkable resolution in the midband and the treble owe more than a little to this enclosure.

Perhaps the most obvious way the new box is affecting the sound is in the top octaves, where almost all traces of “beryllium brightness” have been erased. This is the best—which is to say, the most invisible—Magico tweeter since the dual-ring-radiator in the M5. Clearly most of this improvement is owed to the driver itself—the diamond-coated beryllium MDD28, which because of its larger size and greatly improved diaphragm and magnetic motor is lower in distortion and fuller in range than Magico’s brightish beryllium tweet. This new tweeter, in itself, makes for better dispersion (since, as previously noted, the midrange doesn’t have to play up as high into the upper mids and treble as it used to). But I have to think that some of the improvement is also due to Magico’s magic box, with its less diffractive joints and surfaces. In any event, the differences are there to be heard—and heard easily. For instance, in Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Falla uses a softly struck cymbal to double the violins. Via the M Pro, the wonderful color that the cymbal’s overtones are adding to the color of the strings is revealed as if, once again, the music were being reproduced with surtitles describing the orchestration. It was an effect, dare I say it, that I’d never before noticed—and yet there it was, clear as day.

A Comparative Conclusion
The M Project is, IMO, the most sonically and aesthetically satisfying loudspeaker that Magico has yet made—and that I’ve yet heard. Thanks to the lower distortion and wider bandwidth of its greatly improved diamond-coated beryllium tweeter, the superior stiffness, lower mass, and lesser coloration of its graphene midrange driver, the greatly reduced diffractiveness and superior dispersion of its edgeless aerodynamic enclosure, and the sheer power and color of its larger complement of newly designed, bigger, better-controlled, and easier-to-drive Nanotec-carbon woofers, the M Project has a warmer, fuller, more realistically concert-hall-like balance than any previous Magico. And yet these improvements in timbre and blend, which carry the speaker considerably closer to the absolute sound in tone color, haven’t been purchased at any cost in the phenomenal low-level resolution, lightning-fast transient response, and breathtaking transparency to sources that Magicos have always been famous for. Indeed, the M Project is the most detailed and revealing dynamic loudspeaker I’ve heard in my home. As it stands, it is the first “reference” Magico that will exercise an appeal on every kind of listener: musicality, accuracy, and absolute sound. Obviously, I love it and consider it a major accomplishment.

But…will you love it? The only reasonable answer to this question is: “That depends.”

If you are coming from a line-source loudspeaker—magnetic or electrostatic—the answer is, “Probably not.” No direct-radiating, dynamic-driver speaker in a box—regardless of how “invisible” that box is (and the M Project’s enclosure vanishes as completely as that of a mini-monitor)—is going to have the near-single-driver uniformity, incomparable airiness, and unfettered spaciousness of a great planar. If you’re married to Maggies, Quads, MartinLogans (the CLX, par excellence), etc., you’re simply not going to like any “box speaker” (or “monkey coffin,” as one of my wittier correspondents put it) as well as you do a boxless line source. There is really no use in me pointing out what planars and ’stats can’t do as well as great dynamic loudspeakers, as those things simply don’t matter as much to the planar/’stat crowd, for whom realism on acoustic music recorded in a real space is paramount. (It is amazing—and amusing—how readily planar/’stat fans argue for the realism of their speakers on electronic music like rock ’n’ roll.) Although Magicos are and have always been one of the few cone speakers that remind me of Maggies (Estelons are another)—in the neutrality of their balance, their overall coherence, and their near-boxless presentation—they are not like Maggies in certain key respects (they are more precisely “controlled” sounding than Magnepans or ’stats, which is another way of saying they stop and start with less blur and ringing, are far more detailed and much deeper reaching in the bass—and simply in a different league when it comes to dynamics at low SPLs and high).

Speaking of dynamics, if you are coming from a great horn loudspeaker, the answer will also be, “Probably not,” but for a different set of reasons. Horn lovers typically don’t give much of a damn about a “disappearing act,” or “octave-to-octave coherence,” or overall “neutrality” and the absence of colorations. They view these things as silly “audiophile” preoccupations that have nothing to do with actual music, which, for them, is entirely a matter of lifelike SPLs, in-the-room-with-you presence, unmatched dynamic range, visceral impact on transients and tuttis, enormous detail, and super-rich tone color. Where horns and the M Project intersect—and they do intersect more than many dynamic loudspeakers—is that M Projects will play loud with pretty damn impressive dynamic impact and bring-you-out-of-your-seat transient response. They will also reproduce inner details with resolution that challenges (if it does not actually equal) the super-high-resolution of ultra-low-inertia compression drivers. While I would imagine that most real horn aficionados would find the sound of the M Project acceptable albeit somewhat “polite,” it simply won’t have the in-your-face presence or slam, nor (despite the gains in tone color) the Technicolor richness and weight that horn lovers crave. Nor, of course, will it match the sensitivity of a horn, which can be driven by flea-weight SETs. (Of course, it also won’t have a horn’s various nonlinearities and colorations, either. But that’s another story.)

We come now to the crux. What if you’re coming from another great dynamic loudspeaker—such as a Raidho, a Rockport, a Focal, a YG, a Wilson, a Gauder Akustik, a Stenheim, a Kharma, or, well, you name it?

Here the answer is, once again, “Probably not.”

Let’s take the Raidho D-5 for example, as it is a loudspeaker with which I have long experience. In some ways the Raidho D-5 (like many of the big Wilsons) is the “anti-Magico” of loudspeakers. Though it uses extremely high-tech drivers (diamond-coated ceramic cones and a sealed ribbon that, M Project or no, I still consider to be the word’s best tweeter), it is not voiced primarily via the measuring bench but rather by ear. What this means in practice is that it has a deliberately contoured frequency balance: an elevated mid-to-upper bass and power range (where the ear is least sensitive), a smooth midband, a recessed brilliance and presence range (where the ear is most sensitive), and a slight rise in the top treble (where the ear is also less sensitive). As a result, though scarcely disreputable, the D-5 will not come close to matching the linearity of the M Project in standard measurements; nor is its enclosure, as gorgeous and aerodynamic as it is, anywhere near as inert as that of the M Project. Though not the sing-along music boxes that some Nola enclosures are, the D-5’s box is playing along with the music, particularly in the bass. (Just put a hand to its cabinet and you will feel the vibration.) In addition, the D-5 (like Wilsons) is a ported loudspeaker, with a considerable rise at port resonance and a steep roll-off below it. Though it gives the impression of having really low bass, it doesn’t, any more than Wilsons do.

While the D-5’s ported bass and contoured frequency response are laughably “inaccurate” by Magico’s linear, low-distortion standards, the D-5 is anything but laughable in the listening. The added mid-to-upper bass sock that this speaker generates, the dark, rich, beautiful tone color from top to bottom, the Magico-equaling transient speed, and the superb treble are, in the words of my friend and colleague Andre Jennings, “simply addictive.” Another way of putting this is that the D-5 and the Wilsons are gorgeous, powerful, and finely detailed on every kind of music. Whether they also sound plausibly like the real thing on every kind of music is a different question. But let me say something else here that’ll rock the boat. For most listeners, the absolute sound doesn’t matter. Let me repeat that again: For most listeners, the absolute sound doesn’t matter. For most listeners, it is the effect of the absolute sound (or of the canned one, for that matter)—the horripilating visceral excitement and ravishing beauty of music and not a fool-ya simulacrum of, oh, a violin or a piano—that matters most.

The D-5 and many Wilsons deliver the beauty and excitement of hearing live or canned music quite realistically.

 

Which brings me back to the question at hand. The M Project is the most exciting Magico I’ve heard. It can do what the D-5 and Wilsons do almost as well as the D-5 and the Wilsons. No, it will not give you that big peak in the midbass that so many of you crave, which is why I said I didn’t think the M Project would automatically cause you to abandon a D-5 (or any of the other speakers I mentioned). Let’s be honest: You picked your (very expensive) speaker precisely because of its mix of sonic virtues on the music you listen to, and if you are in love with that mix, a different mix (even if it has similarities and/or superiorities) probably won’t cause you to abandon ship.

However, if you are like me, which is to say, if your listening biases are split among musicality, accuracy, and the absolute sound, so that you can adore the sound of a D-5 for its beauty and excitement, the sound of a CLX for its incredible detail and transparency to sources, and an Avantgarde Trio or Magico Ultimate 3 for its lifelike dynamic range and scope, then, then, my friends, the answer to the big question is, “Yes.”

To put this is musical terms, for those of you who love rock, the M Project will come closer to delivering the midbass slam and excitement of the Raidho D-5 or the Avantgarde Trio or name-your-Wilson than any previous Magico, with the added benefit of also supplying genuinely linear, much more highly resolved low end (down to at least 24Hz). For those of you who crave accuracy, the M Project will come within a hair’s breadth (well, maybe two) of delivering the transparency to source of a CLX, with far more realistic power range and bass range color and better high-frequency extension than a ’stat. For those of you devoted to the absolute sound, the M Project will come as close to sounding “real” on well-recorded instruments as any speaker I’ve heard, regardless of provenance.

With my taste for different kinds of music, and my split-biases when it comes to what I like (mostly an accuracy/absolute sound listener, but with more than a toe—in fact a foot and a leg—in the musicality camp), the Magico M Project is, as I said near the start, the nearest to a completely satisfying transducer that I’ve yet heard. Though I’m not ready to kick the Raidho D-5 to the curb just yet, the M Pro becomes my new reference, until of course Magico pulls the rug out from under me and I have to go looking for something else that fits the bill (or return, as I already periodically do, to the D-5).

Well, at long last, that’s all, folks! I’m done.

SPECS & PRICING

Type: Three-way floorstanding loudspeaker
Driver complement: One 1″ MBD28 tweeter, one 6″ MCG1005 graphene midrange; three 10″ MCG1005 Nanotec-carbon woofers
Sensitivity: 91dB
Impedance: 4 ohms
Frequency response: 20Hz–50kHz
Recommended power: 50–1000 watts
Dimensions: 15″ x 56″ x 23″
Weight: 400 lbs. each
Price: $129,000

MAGICO, LLC
Hayward, CA
magico.net

JV’s Reference System
Loudspeakers: Raidho D-5, Raidho D-1, Avantgarde Zero 1, MartinLogan CLX, Magnepan .7, Magnepan 1.7, Magnepan 3.7, Magnepan 20.7
Linestage preamps: Soulution 725, Constellation Virgo, Audio Research Reference 10, Siltech SAGA System C1, Zanden 3100
Phonostage preamps: Audio Research Corporation Reference Phono 10, Constellation Audio Perseus, Innovative Cohesion Engineering Raptor, Soulution 725, Zanden 120
Power amplifiers: Soulution 711, Siltech SAGA System V1/P1, Constellation Centaur, Audio Research Reference 250, Lamm ML2.3, Zanden 8120, Odyssey Audio Stratos and Khartago
Analog source: Walker Audio Proscenium Black Diamond Mk V, TW Acustic Black Knight, AMG Viella 12
Tape deck: United Home Audio UHA-Q Phase 12 OPS
Phono cartridges: Clearaudio Goldfinger Statement, Ortofon MC Anna, Ortofon MC A90, Air Tight Opus, Fuuga MC
Digital source: Berkeley Alpha DAC 2
Cable and interconnect: Crystal Cable Absolute Dream, Synergistic Research Galileo LE, Ansuz Acoustics Diamond
Power Cords: Crystal Cable Absolute Dream, Synergistic Research Galileo LE, Ansuz Acoustics Diamond
Power Conditioner: Synergistic Research Galileo LE, Technical Brain
Accessories: Synergistic ART and HFT/FEQ system, Shakti Hallographs (6), Zanden room treatment, A/V Room Services Metu panels and traps, ASC Tube Traps, Critical Mass MAXXUM equipment and amp stands, Symposium Isis and Ultra equipment platforms, Symposium Rollerblocks and Fat Padz, Walker Prologue Reference equipment and amp stands, Walker Valid Points and Resonance Control discs, Clearaudio Double Matrix SE record cleaner, Synergistic Research RED Quantum fuses, HiFi-Tuning silver/gold fuses

Tags: MAGICO

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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