EXOTICA: MAGICO Mini Loudspeaker

A world-class mini-monitor from perfectionist designer Alon Wolf

Israeli-American designer Alon Wolf’s MAGICO Mini—the speaker that so impressed me, RH, HP, WG, and just about everyone else who heard it at this past CES—is a compact, stand-mounted, two-way mini-monitor that costs $22,000. At over 200 pounds per side (including its dedicated stands) the Mini is obviously a perfectionist product. (Wolf makes nothing but—e.g., see Robert Harley’s review of the MAGICO Ultimate in Issue 160.) Its beautifully finished sealed enclosure comprises sixteen 1" layers of 17-ply Baltic birch, laminated together and formed into a teardrop shape that tapers towards the rear. Internally, the box is massively braced to reduce standing waves. The drivers themselves aren’t directly attached to the birchwood frame because, according to Wolf, the enormous pressure generated by their back waves inside the Mini’s sealed box would eventually cause fastening screws to work themselves loose, compromising driver/enclosure integrity. Instead, the drivers are bolted to front and rear plates machined from one-and-a-half-inch-thick 6061T-6 aircraft-grade aluminum billets, ensuring that driver/enclosure coupling always remains perfect. Wolf has also milled the front faceplate into a curve rather than a flat plane—a particularly expensive bit of additional machining that doesn’t just look good but also reduces diffraction effects.

The Mini’s 1" ring-radiator tweeter is Scan Speak’s top-of-the-line D2904/700000 Revelator; its 7" mid/woofer is an ultra-expensive MAGICOexclusive design that uses vapor-deposited titanium (the world’s stiffest, lightest metal, ideal for linear pistonic action) in a constrained-layer sandwich. Powered by an outsized neodymium magnet (as is the tweeter), the proprietary titanium mid/woof is said to be capable of linear 1" peak-to-peak excursions (i.e., it has the wallop of a ten-inch driver). All Mini crossover parts are sourced from the Raimund Mundorf Company of Cologne, Germany, maker of the celebrated MCap- Supreme silver/gold capacitors. Like the speaker, Wolf’s one-hundred-and-twenty-pound dedicated stand is a work of applied art, constructed of 6061T- 6 billet-aluminum to increase stiffness and lower energy storage, and treated with birch fascia to improve damping. Its massive bottom plate can be fitted with a variety of spikes or gliders; its top plate is angled at a precise 2.7 degrees to ensure perfect time alignment between tweeter and mid/woofer and is fitted with a unique ball-bearing mounting system to decouple the speaker from the stand.

Wolf has spared no expense to make certain that form maximizes function in his Mini. That said—and for all the cost-noobject parts and fanatical tweaking that have gone into its construction— the Mini on its stand remains a $22,000 two-way, and the question any reviewer or consumer has to face is: Why spend this kind of money on a mini-monitor? Well, let me step completely out of a character for a moment and show you one reason why. Below you will see a quasi-anechoic frequency plot taken by me and my friend Bill Waslo—the genius (and I don’t use the word lightly) behind Liberty Instruments’ remarkable Praxis suite of loudspeakerdesign- and-measurement tools. (For more information on Liberty’s Praxis suite, go to www.libinst.com.)

Take a look at the horizontal frequency plot. From about 57Hz to above 6kHz it is almost ruler-flat, give or take a dB or two, rising a bit more in the top treble (and extending well beyond the test limits into the ultra-high-frequency range) and rolling off at a gentle 6dB/octave in the bass. This, folks, is almost textbook-perfect frequency response for a two-way in a sealed box. What makes this graph even more remarkable is that, in this case, the Mini sounds almost exactly the way it measures.

By this you may think I mean that from the midbass through the lower treble the Mini’s flat frequency response translates uniformly into a more accurate reproduction of instrumental timbres. And this is true to an extent. But only to an extent. A speaker this flat doesn’t “create” more accurate tone colors; it transmits them more accurately. Since tone colors on sources vary wildly—listen to an RCA, a Mercury, and a Decca recording of, say, the Brahms Violin Concerto, one after the other, and then tell me what “accurate” violin timbre means—the Mini will only sound as “good” as the source allows it to sound. Indeed, the Mini may be less appealing on some LPs and CDs than a speaker that doesn’t measure as flat as it does, a speaker that tends to plump up the bass or warm the mids or roll off the treble. This is not to say that the Mini is one of those measures-well-but-sounds-thin-and-analytical numbers. On the contrary, it sounds as dark or light, focused or bloomy, warm or cool, rich or lean as the record itself, though for all its chameleon-like fidelity it always sounds pleasant.