2022 Golden Ear: MBL 101 X-treme MkII Omnidirectional Loudspeaker

REVIEW
by Jonathan Valin
Nov 01, 2022

MBL 101 X-treme MkII Omnidirectional Loudspeaker

$325,000

These truly remarkable omnidirectional loudspeakers have been awarded Golden Ears from me for the past three years (and an Overall Product of the Year Award from TAS in 2019), but since they remain the most realistic-sounding loudspeakers I’ve ever heard, I’m awarding them another GE in 2022. Comprising two Radialstrahler columns and two outboard, powered subwoofer stacks, the 101 X-tremes are giants. Expensive giants. But until you find a speaker system that sounds more like the real thing (on every kind of music) for less money…well, you’re gonna have to settle for second best. As good as drivers-in-a-box speakers have gotten to be (see the Stenheim Alumine 5 SE above), nothing else, dynamic or planar, sounds like these gargantuan Radialstrahlers, because very little else projects its energy, from top to bottom, throughout a true 360 degrees, like instruments themselves do. As a result, the 101 X-tremes simply own the third dimension. And now in this year’s MkII version, the X-tremes have been substantially updated (at a substantial rise in price), with new DSP’d subwoofers and other extensive tweaks and improvements. (I will be reviewing the latest versions as soon as they are available.) As I said in my original review of the X-tremes a decade ago, listening to every other transducer is like going to a movie of a concert; listening to the 101 X-tremes is like going to the live event. If you’ve got the dough (and the space) and are looking for the closest approximation of the real thing, these are the transducers to own.

Tags: AWARDS FLOORSTANDING LOUDSPEAKER MBL

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.