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Magico M5 Loudspeakers

Magico M5 Loudspeakers

For Magico lovers and the just plain curious, here’s a little photo journal covering the delivery of the fabulous Magico M5 loudspeakers.

1) Here they are in their cartons on the delivery truck–about five hundred pounds in their crates ( the structure of the shipping crates has not been finalized yet, so this may not be precisely the same shipping crate in which the M5s will come to you when Magico starts shipping to customers):Magico M5 Loudspeakers

 2) The truck driver uses a lift gate to gets them down to the street:Magico M5 Loudspeakers

3) The mighty Elam brothers arrive to uncrate the speakers, get them in the house, and carry these 360-pound monsters up four double flights of stairs to my third floor listening room:Magico M5 Loudspeakers

4) The shipping carton disassebles easily and the top and side parts of the crate slide away, leaving the speaker sitting on a cushioned base piece. Magico M5 Loudspeakers

5) The speakers come with (locked) casters attached to their aircraft-grade aluminum base plates. A small ramp (supplied) allows you to wheel the speaker off the crate’s base (once the casters are unlocked) and onto your listening room floor (or, in this case, onto the pavement outside my house).Magico M5 Loudspeakers

6) Here is the speaker, wrapped in plastic, fully removed from the crate and sitting on its casters on the sidewalk outside my house. Shaun Elam gives a thumbs up–so far so good.Magico M5 Loudspeakers

7) The Elam Brothers are professional piano movers and incredibly skilled at safely moving large extremely heavy objects. After carefully dressing lifting straps beneath the speaker’s bass plate, James Elam gives the thumbs up as the boys prepare to carry the M5 into my house and up to my listening room.Magico M5 Loudspeakers

8) The boys make it to the first-floor stairwell and get ready for the long climb up.Magico M5 Loudspeakers

9) They begin. You’ll note that James tore holes in the wrapping around the speakers so that he could grasp the M5’s enclosure by its sides. Under no circumstances should you move these speakers by grasping their front panels (where the drivers are located) or lift it by its aircraft-aluminum base plate.Magico M5 Loudspeakers

10) The first landing.Magico M5 Loudspeakers

11) On the way to the third floor:Magico M5 Loudspeakers

12) The Magico M5 in my third floor listening room, still on its casters. I’ll cover removing the casters, situating the speakers, and hooking them up in a subsequent post.Magico M5 Loudspeakers

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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