Magico LLC Mini II Loudspeaker

Magico Mini II Mini-Monitor

I first heard Alon Wolf ’s ground-breaking two-way standmounted loudspeaker, the Magico Mini, at the January 2006 CES, where it made a sensational impression on Robert Harley, Wayne Garica, Harry Pearson, and me. I rave-reviewed it soon after, in Issue 163, and have been living with it as my primary reference ever since.

Almost from go, the Mini was controversial, as any twoway priced at well over twenty thousand dollars (including its massive dedicated stands) would be. There were folks then— and there are folks now—who simply don’t understand why any sane person would pay this kind of dough for a speaker that only makes it down to about 45Hz in the bass. I can understand their point; for Mini money, you could buy any number of dynamic loudspeakers with substantial bass well below 45Hz. The problem for me was that, until the advent of the Mini II, I hadn’t heard a one of them that sounded as much like real music as the Mini did above 45Hz. From the midbass to the top treble, the Magico Mini simply set new standards for a two-way, direct-radiating cone loudspeaker in low coloration and high fidelity, sounding more “of a piece” and disappearing more completely into its (vast) soundfield than any other dynamic speaker I’d auditioned, and reporting on what was upstream of it—from record/CD through amplification—with the kind of see-through transparency that I, for one, customarily associate with a really good preamp rather than a loudspeaker.

Which is why, when Wolf announced a “major” upgrade to the Mini soon after I reviewed it, I didn’t leap at the chance to have my pair turned into Mini IIs. How could something that came as close to the absolute sound—and was, frankly, as downright lovable—as the Mini be substantially “improved”? Although Wolf claimed that the Mini II’s new Magico-designed 7" Nano-Tec mid/woofer went lower and played louder in the bass than the Mini’s 7" titanium-sandwich mid/woof, and that its new “Elliptical Symmetry” crossover (ESXO) reduced the Mini’s already vanishingly-low colorations even further and made the speaker somewhat easier to drive, I was truly afraid that he had traded off some of the Mini’s magic in the midband for a few measly hertz in the low end—a trade I was loath to make.

It was, thus, with the greatest reluctance that I finally sent my beloved Minis back to the Bay Area for retrofitting in the early summer of 2007. (Any Mini owner can do the same thing, BTW, for precisely the difference in price between the Mini and the Mini II, a deal that couldn’t be fairer to purchasers of the original speaker.) Back they came about two weeks later, the only visible difference being the black Nano-Tec mid/woof in place of the silver titanium-sandwich one. As with the original Mini, Wolf advised me to break in the new driver and crossover (including a gold/silver-foil Raimund Mundorf capacitor as big as a man’s fist that costs $300—sixty times the price of the Solen cap commonly used in crossovers) for several hundred hours before listening critically. And that’s what I did.

So…is the broken-in Mini II “improved”? Well, this may be hard to believe—it certainly was to me—but, yes, it is improved, and not by a little bit. What was already the finest two-way mini-monitor I’ve owned or reviewed is now the best dynamic loudspeaker I’ve heard in my home. Shucking off the limitations we customarily associate with mini-monitors like Superman shucking off his dayjob clothes, the Mini II has morphed into far more of a full-range transducer than any two-way in my experience, and it has made this transformation without losing any of the virtues of seamless top-to-bottom coherence, low distortion, high resolution, natural tone color, excellent dynamics, wall-to-wall-to-floor-to-ceiling soundstaging, near-lifesized imaging, and a disappearing act second-to-none that made the original Mini such a high-end milestone. Indeed, the Mini II isn’t just a truly great loudspeaker; it has also been, for me, an education—a means of appreciating just how far the high-end has come in its quest to reproduce the sound of the real thing. By way of the Mini II’s vanishingly low levels of coloration, standard-setting transparency, and sheer electromechanical invisibility, I’ve come to realize that some of the best contemporary components (regardless of cost) are also starting to shed their customary electromechanical signatures, starting to “disappear” more completely as sound sources, and that the illusion of listening to music itself, rather than listening to music through a hi-fi system, really is becoming more convincing (though we still have miles to go before we sleep).