The Magico M5 floorstanding loudspeaker was undoubtedly the most anticipated debut at CES 2009 and it didn’t disappoint. For those of you familiar with the great MartinLogan CLX its sound is easy to describe and uncanny to hear. If you can imagine a CLX with 20Hz bass, 60kHz treble extension, no large-scale dynamic-range limits, no soundstaging limits, and no lack of body and dimensionality, without any sacrifice of the see-through-to-the-source transparency, utter neutrality, single-driver coherence, standard-settingly low levels of harmonic distortion, lightning transient speed, nonpareil low-level resolution, sheer invisibility as a sound source, and breathtakingly lifeilike realism of the CLX then you have an idea of what the M5 sounds like. I have never heard a dynamic or planar or Radalstrahler speaker come this close to the electrostatic ideal without any audible sacrifice of what cone speakers bring to the table. This is quite simply a new standard in transduction, not just the best loudspeaker at this year’s CES, but the best loudspeaker I’ve ever heard at a trade show and, quite possibly (the Magico M6 maybe excepted), the best loudspeaker any amount of money can buy And as you will see, when I post my show report, this was not a show that lacked for stiff competition. In several floors full of very, very, very good speakers, nothing eclipsed this new Magico, which not only takes its place in my little pantheon of great speakers but pushes out several other long-cherished greats of the past. As of CES 2009, the past is now inalterably past. We are in a new Golden Age of stereo, my friends. Not just hitting the same gong at the top of the post that we’ve been hitting, off and on, for the past two decades, but hitting a whole new level–a whole new height of stereophonic high fidelity and realism. Certainly the fabulous Soulution electronics played their part in this great Magico demo, as did Magico’s own fabulous server and the Pacific Microsonics DAC. But the speakers themselves…you can’t hear upstream unless what is downstream is every bit as clear and colorless and high in fidelity as what precedes it. And so the M5s are–to a degree I simply never heard before and didn’t dream possible.
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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