The Magico V3 Loudspeaker

Loud and Proud...

AS: How much research went into designing the drive units?

AW: We have a museum with just about ever driver that was ever made, that’s how we figured out what we could use. That’s part of the reason Magico doesn’t use beryllium tweeters or diamond tweeters, or ribbons – no matter how good they are, they stand out. We don’t necessarily do everything in house – a helicopter rotor blade manufacturer makes the Nano-Tec cone material for example – but everything other than the tweeter (a ScanSpeak Ring Radiator) is our proprietary design.

AS: You mentioned Nano-Tec just now. What’s the technology behind the material?

AW: The Nano-Tec sandwich cone is made of an asymmetrical carbon nano-tube polymer composite. If you put it upside down on the floor and stand on it – with someone on your shoulders – it will not buckle. It’s only seven grams! It’s the stiffest composite that I know of. So you can build cones that stay pistonic throughout the entire audible range.

AS: Why do you mount the bass drivers to the rear of the baffle?

AW: Everything that we do is coupled to metal, the coupling is almost perfect and it will stay that way, because it’s coupling metal on metal. There’s no hardware that sees wood at any moment in that speaker. This is because when you bolt the driver to an MDF baffle, you cannot go past three Newton-pounds torque without damaging it, but on our aluminium cabinets, we go up to 11!