john atkinson magico s5 mk - absolutehiend.com · magico’s vp for global sales & marketing,...

82 February 2017 Q stereophile.com

EQUIPMENT REPORT

Diamond–Nano-Tec–GrapheneIt is its drive-units that distinguish the Mk.II S5 from its predecessor. As Yair Tammam lives and breathes drive-units, I asked him about the changes, particularly that new 26mm-diameter tweeter, which has a 40µm-thick beryllium dome coated with a 5µm-thick layer of pure diamond, and was developed from the 28mm dome first seen in Magico’s statement M-Project speaker.

The first Magico speaker reviewed in Stereophile, the V3, in May 2008,2 used a high-performance ring-radiator tweeter, but Tammam was bothered by the fact that such a tweeter’s diaphragm operates in breakup mode in the upper region of its passband—he wanted a diaphragm that oper-ated as a perfect piston throughout its operating bandwidth. A beryllium dome is both light enough and stiff enough to behave pistonically, and was used in the Magico Q5, which Michael Fremer reviewed in November 2012.3 Applying a

layer of diamond to the metal, Tammam explained, results in a dome with a more homogeneous surface, which both reduces intermodulation distortion and results in a more benign harmonic-distortion signature that is less like that of a metal dome. I asked why they hadn’t gone all the way and used an all-diamond diaphragm. It turned out that, yes, diamond would

produce a very stiff diaphragm, but the required suspension would raise the tweeter’s low-frequency resonance from the desired 500Hz or so to about 1.3kHz. This, in turn, would mean that the tweeter would have to be crossed over to the midrange drive-unit at too high a frequency. Beryllium’s lower mass ensures that the resonance frequency is close to 500Hz, but the diamond layer raises the dome’s stiffness to extend the high frequencies.

Dammit!” No sooner had I praised small loudspeakers while dismissing large speakers as potentially having “large problems,” in my review of the Crystal Arabesque Minissimo Diamond in the October issue,1 than I had to

eat my words. Only days after that issue had gone to press, Magico’s VP for Global Sales & Marketing, Peter Mackay, and CTO Yair Tammam, arrived at my place to set up a pair of the Bay Area company’s floorstanding—and very large—S5 Mk.II loudspeakers.

The S5 Mk.IILike the original S5, the S5 Mk.II is a three-way, floorstand-ing design, 4' tall. The twin, sealed-box–loaded, 10" aluminum-cone woofers with substantial rubber roll sur-rounds, 6" midrange unit with a graphene-coated Nano-Tec cone, and 1.1" diamond-coated, beryllium-dome tweeter are mounted vertically in line on its black front baffle. (Nano-Tec is Magico’s name for a sandwich of Rohacell, a foam composite mate-rial extensively used in the aerospace industry, and external layers of carbon fiber coated with layers of carbon nanotubes.)

The Magico’s internally braced enclosure is constructed from an aluminum extrusion 1⁄2" thick and 16" in diameter, with the midrange unit loaded by a subenclosure made of a proprietary poly-mer. The top cap is machined into complex shapes, both over and under, to minimize external diffraction and inter-nal standing waves, while the bottom plate includes outrig-gers at its four corners into which can be screwed heavy-duty spikes. (As supplied, sturdy wheels are screwed into the outriggers to make handling easier.) Electrical connection is via a pair of binding posts at the bottom of the rear panel.

The S5 Mk.II is available in two different finishes. With the first, called by Magico M-Cast, the speaker costs $38,000/pair. In the handsome high-gloss M-Coat finish of the review samples, the price is $42,750/pair.

JOHN ATKINSON

Magico S5 Mk.IILOUDSPEAKER

Description Three-way,

floorstanding loudspeaker

with sealed enclosure.

Drive-units: 1.1" (26mm)

diamond-coated beryl-

lium-dome tweeter, 6"

(152.4mm) graphene-

coated Nano-Tec–cone

midrange unit, two 10"

(254mm) aluminum-cone

woofers. Frequency range:

20Hz–50kHz. Sensitivity:

88dB/2.83V/m. Nominal

impedance: 4 ohms. Rec-

ommended amplification:

50–1000W.

Dimensions 48" (1220mm)

H by 15" (380mm) W by

14" (360mm) D. Weight:

220 lbs (100kg).

Finishes Metallic gloss or

high-gloss paint.

Serial numbers of units reviewed 00739, 00740.

Price $38,000/pair in

M-Cast standard finish,

$42,750/pair in M-Coat

high-gloss finish. Approxi-

mate number of dealers: 35.

Manufacturer Magico, LLC,

3170 Corporate Place,

Hayward, CA 94545.

Tel: (510) 649-9700.

Web: www.magico.net.

SPECIFICATIONS

ER

ICS

WA

NS

ON

1 See www.stereophile.com/content/crystal-cable-arabesque-minissimo-diamond-loudspeaker.2 See www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/508mag/index.html.3 See www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/magico_q5_loudspeaker/index.html.

I was impressed with the sheer believability of the Magico’s sound.

stereophile.com Q February 2017 83

stereophile.com Q February 2017 85

MAGICO S5 MK.2

Iused DRA Labs’ MLSSA system

and a calibrated DPA 4006 mi-

crophone to measure the Magico

S5 Mk.II’s frequency response

in the farfield, and an Earthworks

QTC-40 for the nearfield and in-room

responses. A complication was that the

220-lb loudspeaker was too bulky for

me to move it outside for the testing, or

to lift it onto my computer-controlled

turntable. I therefore had to do the

quasi-anechoic measurements in my

listening room, where the proximity of

room boundaries led to more than usu-

ally aggressive windowing of the time-

domain data, which in turn reduced the

graphs’ resolution in the midrange.

That said, my estimate of the

Magico’s voltage sensitivity was ap-

proximately 87.5dB/2.83V/m, close to

the specified 88dB. Fig.1 shows how the

S5 Mk.II’s impedance magnitude and

electrical phase angle vary with fre-

quency. The impedance does drop to

minima of 3.15 ohms at 78Hz and 3.55

ohms at 900Hz, and there is a current-

hungry combination of 4.3 ohms and

–49° at 51Hz. Magico specifies the S5

Mk.II as a 4 ohm load, which appears

to be correct. The impedance traces

are free from the small discontinui-

ties that would imply the existence

of panel resonances. Nevertheless, I

found two high-Q vibrational modes,

at 436 and 744Hz, on the sidewalls

level with the midrange unit. These

modes were at a low level, though they

were audible when I listened to the

enclosure walls with a stethoscope.

Tapping the cabinet walls revealed a

slight formant structure correlating

with these modes, but the enclosure

was otherwise inert.

The impedance traces suggest that

the sealed enclosure is tuned to 34Hz.

The two woofers behave identically,

and their summed output is shown as

the green trace in fig.2. The cross-

over to the midrange unit (red trace)

with very small movements, so that the speaker’s character remains the same at low sound-pressure levels as it does at high SPLs.

ListeningAfter Mackay and Tammam had used the excellent Dayton OmniMic v2 system to position the S5 Mk.IIs in my room and declared themselves content, they left for home. The speakers’ front baffles were about 80" from the wall behind them and 98" from my listening position; the left speaker was 38" from the closest sidewall, the right 48" from its sidewall. I settled down for some critical listening, begin-ning with the PS Audio DirectStream DAC (Yale operating

I asked about the Nano-Tec cone used in the midrange unit. Tammam explained that in the earlier versions of this sandwich cone, the inner layer was stiffer than the outer lay-ers, to match the voice-coil former. There followed changes in the former material and the thicknesses of the layers, guided by finite element analysis (FEA), until, in 2014, a Japanese corporation developed a way of laying down the carbon fibers in the weave that resulted in a more even flow of the resin before the material was cured in an oven. This seventh-generation version of Magico’s driver has a cone that contains 30% less resin in the carbon-fiber layers, but one that is 300% stiffer.

In Magico’s prior midrange cone the front layer of carbon fibers was overlaid with carbon nanotubes, but the US company that produced the nanotubes came up with a way of coating the front of the carbon-fiber layer with a skin of graphene, a superstiff sheet of carbon just one atom thick.

It’s desirable that a speaker cone be of varying thickness: thickest at the center and the boundary with the voice-coil former, thinnest at the junction with the surround. However, Magico used to use a sandwich core of constant thickness, because the foam material would fracture if the thickness varied. For their new generation of midrange units they developed a process in which the foam is carefully injected between the front and back carbon-fiber, to permit the overall thickness to vary in the desired manner.

Tammam told me that they made much use of the Klip-pel analysis system in the development of the S5 Mk.II’s drive-units, particularly regarding the spider, to get a signifi-cantly greater linear cone excursion. Computer simulation of the driver as a complete system—cone, surround, spider, motor, and magnetic circuit—allowed them to produce a drive-unit that combined the best technologies currently available to give performance that doesn’t significantly change with the rise in temperature that typically occurs after a couple of hours of operation.

Yair Tammam summed up his goals in drive-unit design as achieving linearity not just with large excursions but

M E A S U R E M E N T S

Fig.1 Magico S5 Mk.II, electrical impedance (solid) and phase (dashed) (5 ohms/vertical div.).

Stereophile Magico S5 Mk.II Impedance (ohms) & Phase (deg) vs Frequency (Hz)

stereophile.com Q February 2017 87

MAGICO S5 MK.2

measurements, continued

system, which I prefer to the earlier Pikes Peak) directly feeding my Pass Labs XA60.5 monoblocks, and the Magicos hooked up to the Passes with Kubala-Sosna Elation! cables.

The low-frequency, 1⁄3-octave warble tones on my Editor’s Choice (ALAC file ripped from CD, Stereophile STPH016-2) played cleanly down to 25Hz, with the 32Hz tone not excit-ing the lowest-frequency mode in my room as is usually the case. Although the 20Hz tone seemed quieter than those immediately above it, the Studio Six SPL meter app on my iPhone, used with Studio Six’s iTestMic, regis-tered it as being equally loud. That it seemed quieter was due not only to my reduced hear-ing sensitivity in the very low bass, but also to the fact that distortion, which would produce harmonics that would be more audible, must be low in level.

The bass guitar on Editor’s Choice had nice weight, but without the blurring of attacks that can happen with high-Q reflex speakers. However, over time I felt that the Magicos’ bass was a little too fat with the Pass Labs

amps. Substituting MBL Corona C15 monoblocks gave better control of the low frequencies. With “Another Brick in the Wall Parts 1 & 2,” from Pink Floyd’s The Wall (24-bit/96kHz FLAC files, Colum-bia), the MBL amps kept superb control of the Magicos’ woofers without sacrific-ing low-frequency power. The speakers’ clarity in this region made it possible for me to maximally differentiate between the sounds of the bass guitar and the kick drum—they didn’t seem to be compet-ing with one another. The deep-pitched, low-F purr from Dave Holland’s double bass that leads into the entrance of Norah Jones’s unmistakable voice in “Court and Spark,” from Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters (24/96 Apple Lossless, Verve/HDtracks) was viscerally satisfying in

a way that some say you can’t get from sealed-box speakers. The sub-40Hz notes in my 2014 recording of

appears to be set at 300Hz, and the

broad peak in the midbass will be

almost entirely due to the nearfield

measurement technique, which as-

sumes a 2pi (half-spherical) acoustic

environment for the drivers. This peak

aside, the –6dB frequency is just below

30Hz, which means that with the slow,

12dB/octave rolloff below the tuning

frequency that is typical of a sealed

enclosure, and the typical amount

of boundary reinforcement or “room

gain,” the S5 Mk.II’s output will extend

to 20Hz. The Magico’s upper-frequen-

cy farfield output, averaged across a

30° horizontal window centered on the

tweeter axis (fig.3, blue trace above

300Hz), is impressively even overall,

though with slight depressions in the

presence region and in the top octave

before the ultrasonic peak, due to the

tweeter’s primary dome resonance.

Note, however, that this resonance lies

above the 30kHz limit of this graph.

Because of the practical limitations

of my listening room, I was able to plot

the S5 Mk.II’s horizontal dispersion

out to only 30° to the sides. The result,

with the off-axis traces normalized to

the tweeter-axis response, is shown in

fig.3: the speaker’s off-axis behavior is

smooth and even, with the beginnings

of a top-octave rolloff evident more

than 20° to the side. In the vertical

plane, with again the off-axis traces

normalized to the response on the

tweeter axis (which is 42" from the

floor), the Magico’s balance doesn’t

change significantly over a ±10°

window (fig.4). Only when you get to

15° above the tweeter does a suckout

at the upper crossover frequency begin

to be seen, suggesting a sensible cross-

over configuration.

The red trace in fig.5 shows the

spatially averaged response of the pair

of S5 Mk.IIs in my listening room. To

create such graphs, I average 20 1⁄6-

octave–smoothed spectra, individually

taken for the left and right speakers

using SMUGSoftware’s FuzzMeasure

3.0 program and a 96kHz sample rate,

in a rectangular grid 36" wide by 18"

high and centered on the positions of

my ears. This mostly eliminates the

room acoustic’s effects.

To provide a visual reference,

the blue trace is that of the Crystal

Arabesque Minissimo Diamonds in

my room; I found the Crystal speaker’s

balance slightly midrange-forward,

Fig.2 Magico S5 Mk.II, anechoic response on tweeter axis at 50”, averaged across 30° horizontal window and corrected for microphone response, with nearfield responses of midrange unit (red) and woofers (green), plotted in the ratios of the square roots of the radiating areas, and the complex sum of the nearfield midrange and woofer responses plotted below 300Hz.

Fig.3 Magico S5 Mk.II, lateral response family at 50”, normalized to response on tweeter axis, from back to front: differences in response 30–5° off axis, reference response, differences in response 5–30° off axis.

Fig.4 Magico S5 Mk.II, vertical response family at 50”, normalized to response on tweeter axis, from back to front: differences in response 15–5° above axis, reference response, differences in response 5–10° below axis.

Inside the S5 Mk.II. Note midrange subenclosure (in French blue).

Frequency in Hz

Ampl

itude

in d

B

Analog Source Linn Sondek LP12 turntable with Lingo

power supply, Linn Ekos tonearm, Linn Arkiv B cartridge.

Digital Sources Aurender N10 music server; Ayre Acous-

tics C-5xeMP universal player; dCS Rossini CD player &

Rossini Clock; PS Audio PerfectWave DirectStream D/A

converter; AudioQuest JitterBug, UpTone Audio ReGen

USB cleaner-uppers; Mac mini running Vinyl Studio, Pure

Music 3; Ayre Acoustics QA-9 USB and Benchmark ADC-1

A/D converters.

Phono Preamplifiers Linn Linto, Liberty Audio B2B-1,

Channel D Seta L.

Power Amplifiers MBL Corona C15, Pass Labs XA60.5

(both monoblocks).

Loudspeakers Crystal Cable Arabesque Minissimo

Diamond.

Cables Digital: AudioQuest Coffee. USB: Canare AES/EBU.

Interconnect (balanced): AudioQuest Wild Blue, Cardas

Clear. Speaker: Kubala-Sosna Elation!. AC: Kubala-Sosna

Elation!, manufacturers’ own.

Accessories Target TT-5 equipment racks; Ayre Acoustics

Myrtle Blocks; ASC Tube Traps, RPG Abffusor panels;

Shunyata Research Dark Field cable elevators; Audio Power

Industries 116 Mk.II & PE-1 AC line conditioners (hard

drive, computers). AC power comes from two dedicated

20A circuits, each just 6’ from breaker box.—John Atkinson

A S S O C I AT E D E Q U I P M E N T

stereophile.com Q February 2017 89

MAGICO S5 MK.2

measurements, continued

Jonas Nordwall performing the Toccata of Widor’s Organ Symphony 5 at Portland’s First United Methodist Church (24/88.2 AIFF file) literally shook the walls of my listening room without sounding bloated or boomy.

The dual-mono pink-noise track on Editor’s Choice was reproduced by the S5 Mk.IIs with a very narrow, stable central image, and none of the splashing toward the speaker positions at some frequencies that would imply the existence of resonances. However, while the Magicos sounded hollow and nasal when I stood up, as expected from the speaker’s measured vertical dispersion (see “Measurements” sidebar), I found I needed to sit on the tweeter axis (42" above the floor) to get sufficient mid-treble—an experience that con-flicts with the measurements. The top octave also sounded shelved down if I sat in my chair in my customary slouch.

But when I sat at attention, I was impressed not only with the solidity of the Magicos’ stereo images but with the sheer believability of the sound. The delicate fragility of the late Radka Toneff’s voice in her reading of Jimmy Webb’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” from her Fairytales (24/192 AIFF needle drop from LP, Odin LP03), was fully preserved. I’d made a number of needle drops of this track using Linn Linto, Channel D Seta L, and Liberty Audio B2B-1 phono preamplifiers, with Ayre Acoustics QA-9 and Benchmark ADC-1 A/D converters. As I listened to the files through the Magicos with peak levels equalized, the differences be-tween the various phono preamps and converters was more apparent than I remembered hearing when I made them.

Returning to Editor’s Choice: The half-step spaced tonebursts

which you can see here as the small

peak in the upper midrange compared

with the Magico. Both speakers have a

dip in the midrange, due to interference

from the closest boundaries, but the S5

Mk.II’s in-room balance is impressively

even up to the low treble, above which

its output gently and smoothly slopes

down, primarily due to the increased

absorptivity of the room’s furnishings

in this region. The Minissimo Diamond

being a minimonitor, its response rolls

off below 90Hz, while the sealed-box

Magico both extends down to 20Hz

and doesn’t excite the lowest-frequen-

cy modes in my room to the extent that

reflex-loaded full-range speakers do.1

Turning to the time domain, the

step response in fig.6, taken on the

tweeter axis, reveals that all four of the

S5 Mk.II’s drive-units are connected

in positive acoustic polarity, with the

tweeter’s output leading that of the

midrange unit, which in turn leads

that of the woofers. More important,

the decay of the tweeter’s step blends

smoothly with the start of the mid-

range unit’s step, and the decay of that

step blends smoothly with the start

of the woofers’ step. You can see, just

past the 7ms marker, that the decay

of the woofers’ step is disturbed by a

reflection from the nearest boundary,

in this case the floor. The presence

of this reflection meant that I had to

aggressively window the time-domain

data when I calculated the cumula-

tive spectral-decay or waterfall plot

(fig.7), as indicated by the dotted area

in this graph. But other than a low-level

ridge of delayed energy at the cursor

position of 5.7kHz, the S5 Mk.II’s initial

decay is very clean.

There can be no question: My mea-

surements of Magico’s S5 Mk.II reveal

it to be a superbly well-engineered

loudspeaker.—John Atkinson

Fig.5 Magico S5 Mk.II, spatially averaged, 1⁄6- octave response in JA’s listening room (red); and of Crystal Arabesque Minissimo Diamond (blue).

Fig.6 Magico S5 Mk.II, step response on tweeter axis at 50" (5ms time window, 30kHz bandwidth).

Fig.7 Magico S5 Mk.II, cumulative spectral-decay plot on tweeter axis at 50" (0.15ms risetime).

1 See, for example, fig.7 at www.stereophile.com/content/psb-imagine-t3-loudspeaker-measure-ments.

Time in ms

Data

in V

olts

Frequency in Hz

Ampl

itude

in d

B

stereophile.com Q February 2017 91

MAGICO S5 MK.2

on this CD sounded very even at the listening position. However, listen-ing to the speaker enclosures with a stethoscope, I could hear, on the side-walls level with midrange unit, some liveliness between 450 and 500Hz and between 600 and 800Hz. This behavior was at a low level and didn’t color the sound of Wayne Shorter’s soprano saxophone in “Court and Spark,” which has a lot of energy in these regions. Joni Mitchell’s husky contralto in “The Tea Leaf Prophecy,” also from River, was presented by the Magicos with maximal pitch differentiation—what Linnies back in the 1980s used to call “playing tunes.” And the haunting high-register piano intro that leads into the late Leonard Cohen’s resigned spoken basso in River’s “The Jungle Line” sounded perfectly natural, as did the parallel-fifths figure between the verses.

As well as offering full-range envelopment, uncolored vocal and instrumental sounds, and a spacious, stable soundstage, the Magicos could play loud without low-level details becoming obscured. In Benjamin Zan-der’s recording of Mahler’s Symphony 2 with the Philharmonia Orchestra (24/192 Apple Lossless file, Linn CKD 452), captured by the old Telarc team of engineer Michael Bishop and producer Elaine Martone, the climaxes seemed more climactic without the quiet passages sounding in any way exaggerated or given short shrift. And again, the Magicos loved the sound of the solo women’s voices in this record-ing: mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and soprano Miah Persson.

The 1958 recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade by Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande Orchestra (16/44.1 rip from CD, Decca) has a rather close-sounding balance, but the Magico S5 Mk.IIs handled with aplomb this work’s big dynamic sweeps, such as the one three minutes into The Story of the Kalendar Prince, and the drumstrokes and cymbal crashes in Festival at Baghdad lit up the recording acoustic. Nevertheless, such small details as the sound of the snare wires in the drum pattern in The Young Prince and the Young Princess were readily apparent without being thrust forward at me. On the 1963 recording of El-gar’s Introduction and Allegro, with Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Sinfonia of London and the Allegri Quartet (16/44.1, Apple Lossless rip from CD, EMI Classics CDM 5 67240 2), the fragile images of the string quartet

4 Prices quoted were those current when these speakers were reviewed. See www.stereophile.com/content/wilson-audio-specialties-alexia-loudspeaker and www.stereophile.com/content/vivid-audio-giya-g3-loudspeaker.

were set forward in the soundstage, with the rich, warm string orchestra behind them. The wonderful reprise of the big tune with the full orchestra after the fugue, and then the joyous coda three minutes before the work’s conclusion, were presented by the MBL-driven Magicos with maximum dynamic fervor.

Those last two recordings are 59 and 54 years old, respectively, but the Magico S5 Mk.II’s full-range trans-parency and resolution maximized the ability of my audio system to act as a time machine, allowing me to disregard the obsolete technology with which these recordings were made to focus on the music.

Time machine? Years ago, I’d trans-ferred to digital a cassette recording of a 1981 chamber-music concert in which I performed my own tran-scription for bass recorder of Rach-maninoff’s Vocalise, with Hi-Fi News & Record Review’s then editorial assistant, Felicity Mulgan, accompanying me on piano. The Magicos plunged me 35 years back into the dry acoustic of that London hall—there I was, onstage, playing this most Romantic of music on a decidedly non-Romantic instru-ment: a large-bore renaissance recorder from which I’d removed the top cap so that I could blow straight onto the fipple to better control the intonation.

Yes, the higher the quality of the sys-tem, the better it can transport the lis-tener back in time—even when, in the case of my Rachmaninoff recording, the curtains on the machine’s windows might have been better left closed.

Summing UpMy congratulations to Magico’s Alon Wolf and Yair Tammam for producing a speaker that offers full-range, uncol-ored, low-distortion sound coupled with superbly stable and accurate stereo imaging. At $38,000–$42,750/pair, the S5 Mk.II is not too dissimilar in price to the Wilson Audio Alexia ($48,500/pair) and Vivid G4 Giya ($39,990/pair), which I reviewed in December 2013 and March 2014, re-spectively.4 The Magico S5 Mk.II joins those speakers as one I could live with when I’m done with this reviewing business. It may indeed be large, but, as I found out, it had no problems, large or otherwise. Q

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