Alon Wolf of Magico Visits HIFICRITIC 19/03/2015

Alon Wolf visits hificritic listening room to check on the Magico S5 loudspeakers

With my system reconstructed with potential review product including new MM2 XL Series 2 Transparent cables, a massive Constellation Centaur Stereo power map 500W/ch into my 4ohm Magico S5, plus the Audio Research Reference 5SE, and my sorted out NAIM NDS/555ps, Alon dropped by to see how his speaker design sounded in situ. 

Never one to dish out praise, he muttered that there was likely sufficient gestalt in the reproduction and that my spacious if unorthodox room complemented the S5 pretty well. He had noted that several reviewers he had visited, on both sides of the pond, had rooms so small that the innate speaker acoustic never freed itself from the over-proximate boundaries and that the sound quality he had painstakingly developed was not significantly present. He felt that he had to take the view that the reviewer was likely adjusted to the location and that some quality differences could be discerned between products after all.

He was very open about his almost obsessive approach to loudspeaker design which if not by his intention, has resulted in very costly designs. Many known failings in driver, enclosure and crossover behaviour have been ruthlessly chased down in his search for naturalness, clarity and a deeply coherent time signature. A key issue is the improvement in signal to noise ratio, a parameter normally applied to electronics but not to loudspeakers, I think because the figures for speakers are so poor. At decent operating levels a power amplifier may offer a 100dB signal to noise, more than good enough, while the majority of loudspeakers struggle to get better than 36 dB over the audible band and maybe 53dB in the mid range, this for the better examples. By comparison my measurements, now for three Magico designs, have shown comparable results at -50 dB overall and -60dB mid band.

Alon makes no apology for the size and weight engendered by neither this approach nor the application of low noise sealed box bass design which trades 3dB of efficiency, bucking the extant marketing trend, in his pursuit of better timing and phase coherence in the bass. As I have also found in review very good amplifiers are required to make the best of these exacting loudspeakers.