TAS 196: Magico M5 Loudspeaker

Redefining A Genre

First, a confession: I generally don’t like big dynamic loudspeakers. To me their chief raisons d’être are loudness and bass. And since I gravitate toward small-scale acoustic music where neither is a necessity, I don’t see the point of giving up all that you stand to lose with one of these behemoths for (to my way of thinking) the little that you stand to gain.

Yes, Virginia, you do give up a few items with a big multiway dynamic loudspeaker. First of all, where do you put it? If you live in a penthouse this may not be the issue that it is in my smallish listening room, although the corollary to “Where do you put it?”—to wit, “Where do you put it without exciting all sorts of room resonances?”—can remain a problem even in a penthouse. Second, how do you make that menagerie of drivers—all those paper or silk or metal or ribbon tweeters, upper-midrange cones, lower-midrange cones, mid/woofers, and woofers, with different on- and off-axis dispersion patterns, power-handling capabilities, and break-up modes—cohere? It’s hard enough to make a two-way sound like a single thing, but a four- or five-way? Third, those giant enclosures aren’t just hard to place; they’re hard to erase. To me, the first essential duty of any loudspeaker (of any piece of hi-fi gear) is to disappear as a sound source. A “disappearing act” is a lot harder to achieve when you have a cabinet with the surface area of a picnic blanket, every square inch a potential source of diffraction or reflection. Fourth, lots of drivers mean lots of crossovers—those heal-alls that are supposed to compensate for all the other problems I’ve mentioned (like different dispersion patterns, power-handling capabilities, and break-up modes). Crossovers may be necessary, but lots of them with lots of different parts, slopes, and hinge points aren’t necessarily good things. (Just consider how hard it is to get the simple high-pass crossover in a subwoofer to work right.)

So what happens to that Holy Grail “disappearing act” when you house half-a-dozen different drivers, with half-a-dozen different high-pass and low-pass filters, in a gigantic singing box? Don’t ask. Not only do you usually hear the box, you sometimes hear the individual drivers, the crossovers, everything. Now I’ll grant that materials, technology, and engineering have come a long way in the past decade—and that big speakers are considerably better than they used to be. (The Rockport Hyperion was a high point for me, as were the Kharma Grand Exquisite and the Wilson MAXX Series 3 I heard at CES.) Nonetheless, as a group they still evince many of the driver-coherency and enclosure problems I’ve mentioned, and in worst cases, can still carry you about as far from the “single-driver” ideal as any kind of loudspeaker can take you. Is it any wonder, then, that I prefer (bass-limited) ’stats, planars, and mini-monitors?

But…what about the fifth string of that five-string Fender Deluxe American Jazz bass guitar, I hear some of you asking? What about rock-concert power handling? How can you listen to the latest Slayer album at “lifelike” (or would that be “death-like,” because you’re surely killing your ears) levels on a Quad 2905, a MartinLogan CLX, a Maggie 1.6QR, or a Magico Mini II? Well…you can’t. There—I’ve said it. But let me also say something about so-called deep bass in many typical large ported dynamic loudspeakers.

First of all, more often than not the bass isn’t really that deep. There is more than one gigantic loudspeaker out there with a steep roll-off below 35–40Hz. What keeps you from noticing this is its greatly elevated midbass and upper bass—a plateau in the 40–125Hz region that can make standard four-string bass guitars or Hammond organs or jazz/rock drumkits sound astonishingly powerful and “authoritative,” giving the impression of a really deep-reaching low end although none of these instruments really goes that deep (the lowest E of a four-string bass is 41.2Hz). Many audiophiles tend to like speakers that accentuate the mid-to-upper bass in this way. They think the sound is more exciting and visceral—and it is. It can also be annoying.