MAGICO Ultimate Loudspeaker

The Bugatti Veyron of Hi-Fi

For those of you who don’t follow the automotive press, Bugatti’s new Veyron 16.4 is an insanely over-the-top supercar with unprecedented performance—and an unprecedented price. The Veyron sports 1000 horsepower, a top speed in excess of 250 mph, and aerodynamic body panels that deploy at high speeds. The price? $1.2 million.

If there’s a parallel to the Veyron in the audio world, surely it is the “Ultimate” loudspeaker system from MAGICO. Like the Veyron, the Ultimate is hand-built in limited numbers, planned without compromise to be the best in the world, extravagant in design and execution, and, at a hair under a quarter of a million dollars, wildly expensive.

MAGICO is a small manufacturer of very-high-end loudspeakers with just three models in its line. The Oakland, California-based company makes the $22,000-per-pair Mini, a two-way mini-monitor with integral stands. Revered by Japanese audiophiles and the Japanese press (it just won Stereo Sound’s 2005 Grand Prix Award, as well as the COMPO Grand Prix Award from Radio Engineering), the jewel-like Mini makes a statement in itself (a twenty-two-grand mini-monitor?). MAGICO also makes to order the Reference, a $120,000 system recently chosen by the great mastering engineer Paul Stubblebine for his mastering room. The Reference was the only other model in the MAGICO line until an interesting collaboration developed between MAGICO founder and chief designer Alon Wolf and a small cadre of West-Coast audiophiles including Bob Nachtigall.

A little history sets the stage for what will follow. About ten years ago, Nachtigall walked into a small high-end store in San Francisco and casually explained that he hadn’t bought a new “stereo” since his college years and was interested in what “a really good hi-fi sounded like these days.” This is Nachtigall’s recollection of that moment: “I was encouraged to sit facing a pair of utterly plain, ladies-shoebox-sized, rectangular wooden boxes ridiculously perched as if on impossibly tiny ballerina tiptoes atop a pair of Stonehenge-class, roughcast, gun-metal-gray pedestals. Just as I was beginning to wonder if the proprietor had not taken appropriate notice of my Italian-made suit or understood the meaning of my request to hear his ‘really good’ equipment, he walked over to a stack of brushed aluminum boxes, pushed a couple of buttons, and walked out of the room. Somewhat bemused and certainly not quite comfortable, I followed him with my eyes as he left the room, then turned back to face the diminutive speakers just at the exact instant when the sound of guitars, drums, and bass so immediately, completely, and explosively filled the room that I can only imagine that the sensation would not be unlike witnessing the Big Bang from an infinitely distant vantage point. The astonishingly detailed intensity of the music coincident with the sublime and magical illusion of hearing and ‘seeing’ a woman’s voice suspended in space left me so stunned that I have no recollection of breathing during the entire experience. I remember some time later falteringly staggering out of the room in a disoriented stupor.” [The loudspeakers were Totem Acoustic Model 1s. —RH]

Needless to say, Nachtigall was hooked on high-end audio. By 2001 he had spent years on the familiar upgrade treadmill but was never quite satisfied with any of the loudspeakers he had owned or auditioned. Purely by chance, Nachtigall was introduced to MAGICO designer Alon Wolf at the time when Wolf was finalizing the design of his all-aluminum, four-way, dynamic-driver Reference. But just when Nachtigall was about to commit to the Reference, Wolf began experimenting with very large horns and compression drivers to satisfy himself that he hadn’t overlooked any technology. Immediately, Wolf realized that he was on to something. He demonstrated these radical experimental speakers for Nachtigall, who immediately shared Wolf’s enthusiasm for the potential of a massive, hornloaded system. Nachtigall and a small group of fellow West- Coast audiophiles commissioned Wolf to design and build not just the best loudspeaker in the world, but the best possible loudspeaker that could be created.

Thus began a four-year project that resulted in the Ultimate. Standing a few inches short of eight-feet tall and weighing more than 800 pounds apiece, the Ultimate is an allaluminum, five-way horn-loaded system. In the active configuration, each of the Ultimate’s four horn drivers must be powered by its own amplifier, with an external active crossover dividing the frequency spectrum. An additional amplifier channel is required (per side) to drive the direct-radiating woofer. The two midrange horns (8" and 20", respectively) are machined from solid blocks of aircraft-grade aluminum, and then anodized to give them a subtle pearlescent glow. The massive midbass horn, mounted at the top of the system, is made from .25"-aluminum reinforced by 56 machined-aluminum ribs that are hand-welded to the frame. It takes more than two months to construct just one of these devices. The machined parts are so big and intricate that only two machine shops in the country can fabricate them. The woofer and three of the horns (tweeter, upper-midrange, midrange) are mounted in a 2"-thick slab of aluminum that acts as the baffle. The precision with which the horns fit into this panel is remarkable. At the throat of each horn is an ultra-expensive, high-sensitivity compression driver (as high as 115dB 1W/1m). A support structure behind the baffle holds the horns and compression drivers in place. The woofer is a conventional direct-radiating design (a horn-loaded woofer would have been too big) based on a custom Aura 15" driver with a neodymium magnet and 4" edgewound voice coil, and a peak-to-peak excursion of 2.5".