Magico Swings for the Fences: The M9 Loudspeaker by Robert Harley

I just returned from visiting Magico’s factory in Hayward, California, where I heard the company’s flagship M9 loudspeaker and learned about its design. The occasion also marked the recent completion of an acoustic overhaul of the Magico factory listening room.

Magico has a compelling track record of technical innovation and creating great-sounding loudspeakers. The all-new M9 is the ultimate realization of the company’s technologies and aesthetic, and also introduces a ground-breaking new cabinet construction. Significantly, the M9 is also the first Magico loudspeaker to benefit from two new sophisticated measurement instruments. I had seen photographs of the M9 on Magico’s website but was floored to experience the speaker in person. Its sheer size, massive drivers, and stunning execution in flawless carbon fiber and aluminum are awe-inspiring. As I learned by seeing various components of the M9 under construction, the speaker is at the cutting edge of speaker technology. And as I discovered through about eight hours in the listening seat over two days, this new flagship sets a reference standard in reproduced music.

The M9 is a four-way, six-driver dynamic speaker in a sealed enclosure measuring 80” tall. The lower section flares dramatically into a wide oval that is reminiscent of a hoop skirt. The system is shipped in two sections; the lower section houses the dual 15” woofers, 6” midrange, and 1.1” tweeter. The upper section holds two 11” mid/bass drivers and is mated to the lower section when the speaker is installed. Each M9 weighs 1000 pounds, and the pair is priced at $750,000.

An important new design element of the M9 is that the system is designed to be actively bi-amplified. The 120Hz crossover transition between the 15” woofers and the rest of the speaker is performed at line level in an outboard analog two-way active crossover. A preamplifier output feeds Magico’s MXO crossover, which splits up the audio band at 120Hz. One stereo output from the MXO (the low-pass-filtered signal) feeds a stereo amplifier or pair of monoblocks to drive the 15”-woofer sections of each speaker. The second of the MXO’s stereo outputs (the high-pass-filtered signal) is sent to a second stereo amp (or pair of monoblocks) that drive the rest of each speaker. (The crossover between the mid/bass and midrange driver and between the midrange and tweeter is realized with integral passive crossover components housed in an isolated carbon-fiber chamber in the speaker’s lower enclosure.) This actively bi-amplified architecture confers a huge advantage in that the amplifier driving the 15” woofers can be connected directly to the woofers with no intervening, signal-robbing crossover components. Specifically, crossover circuits have a big inductor in series with the woofer that rolls off mid and high frequencies to the woofer. The lower the crossover frequency, the bigger the inductor, and the greater the inductor’s deleterious effect. Removing that inductor has many advantages, including allowing the woofer amplifier to exert iron-fisted control over the woofer’s motion. As with all Magico loudspeakers, the enclosure is sealed rather than ported.

This sounds fine in theory, but in practice the crossover is in the entire signal path; any degradation imposed by it will compromise the system’s performance. With a speaker as high in resolution as the M9 is, and its obvious ambitions as a state-of-the-art transducer, the electronics in the crossover must be nothing less than transparent. Magico researched most of the active outboard crossovers that have ever been on the market before designing its own for the M9. The M9’s MXO active crossover, supplied with the speaker, is a tour de force. It’s safe to say that no analog active crossover has ever been created at this level of design and execution. The crossover is housed in two large chassis, one for the electronics and one for the power supply. The supply is bigger than that found in many power amplifiers. Modules in the electronics chassis can be changed to allow for different crossover frequencies. The crossover is built to—or beyond—the standards of the highest-end preamplifier circuits.

The M9 introduces several innovations, including a new cabinet construction that combines unprecedented stiffness with high damping. The front baffle and rear “spine” are machined from aluminum, as they are in all M Series speakers, but unlike those other models, the sides of the enclosure are a new design that sandwiches an aluminum honeycomb structure between two skins of carbon fiber. The six, three-sided cross-braced carbon/honeycomb chassis (per pair of speakers) are built to Magico’s specs by a company that developed the aluminum-honeycomb-and-carbon-fiber arrangement for use in nuclear submarines and aerospace applications. The “beam section” created by this structure is extremely stiff, but also well damped and relatively light. All the internal braces within the enclosure are made from thick carbon fiber.

Magico’s custom Nano-Tech drivers feature a similar sandwich of carbon-fiber and graphene skins over an aluminum honeycomb. The voice coils are massive (5” in the 15” woofer, for example) and are built around titanium formers. The M9 employs the eighth generation of these drivers, which have proven themselves over many previous iterations of Magico products. The tweeter is the sixth generation of the company’s 28mm beryllium/diamond dome, used for the first time in the M9. (The very thin layer of diamond is vapor-deposited on the beryllium dome to further increase the dome’s stiffness.)

The entire speaker is curved, with no discontinuities that would introduce diffraction. Magico built and tested 25 different midrange/tweeter baffle profiles before finding the optimum shape. With a pair of speakers requiring two midrange/tweeter baffles, that’s 50 baffles that had to be machined from aluminum blocks, each one taking a full day to mill on a CNC machine.

The drivers are mounted to a flat aluminum plate behind the baffle. A layer of damping material sits between this flat panel and the curved front baffle, with front-to-back tensioning rods compressing the entire structure. Using a laser vibrometer, Magico can create an animated graphic representation of baffle vibration with very fine detail, and then adjust this damping layer to minimize cabinet vibration. The damping material itself is available in different densities to target different frequency bands.

I saw the laser vibrometer in action on the factory tour. The speaker under test is positioned a few feet from the laser, and as the speaker is driven by an audio signal the reflected laser light from the speaker panel is analyzed. The measurement is repeated across 2000 points on the cabinet surface in an automated process. The result is a color graphic showing the amplitude of the cabinet’s movement—blue for small movement, progressing to red for the greatest panel excursion. The graphic display can be put in motion to show how the vibration signature changes over time. This information guides the cabinet design, specifically in the placement of bracing and the effectiveness of different damping techniques, among other factors. I saw a comparison of the vibration signature of the aluminum cabinet of Magico’s A5 loudspeaker ($25,000) along with the vibration signature of a similarly priced loudspeaker whose cabinet is made from MDF. The contrast was stark; the MDF enclosure was in relatively constant high-amplitude motion, its panels glowing bright red in the analysis indicating the greatest panel motion and thus cabinet-induced distortion.

In addition to the laser vibrometer, Magico has acquired a new state-of-the-art measurement tool that is revolutionizing loudspeaker design. Until this instrument, it was impossible to directly measure a speaker’s low-frequency performance, even in a massive anechoic chamber. Most anechoic chambers provide accurate measurement down to about 200Hz. The larger the chamber, the lower the frequency that can be accurately measured, with the largest chambers good to about 100Hz. This new device, the Klippel Near Field Scanner, can accurately measure a speaker’s frequency response down to 20Hz without an anechoic chamber. The NFS extracts the speaker’s direct sound from reflections off the floor, walls, and nearby objects by removing these reflections in software. Moreover, the Near Field Scanner will plot the frequency response at 360º around the speaker in 1º increments. The automated process positions the microphone, takes a measurement, and then automatically moves the microphone slightly for the next measurement. This process takes about 24 hours for one speaker. At a quarter of a million dollars, the Klippel machine is expensive, but vastly less costly than building an anechoic chamber—and unlike an anechoic chamber, the NFS can accurately measure a speaker’s low-frequency response down to 20Hz.

I had visited Magico’s listening room before the recent overhaul and thought it was the best room I’d heard. Magico founder Alon Wolf told me that he agreed, but that the room needed to be a laboratory reference as free from coloration as possible. Specifically, the previous room had some audible resonant modes below 120Hz, colorations that left him sometimes second-guessing himself about a loudspeaker’s intrinsic tonal balance. Although all rooms, no matter how sophisticated their design, will exhibit resonance modes, Magico’s newly rebuilt room has a more linear low-frequency response.

Alon told me that with the new room, the laser vibrometer, and the Klippel NFS, he finally had tied together the three elements of designing and building loudspeakers—computer modeling, measurement, and listening. Magico has long used computer modeling and simulations in its development efforts, largely through the prodigious talents of Magico’s Chief Technical Officer Yair Tammam. Yair, who joined Magico in 1998, once described to me how a software breakthrough allowed him to model a driver’s behavior in the mechanical, thermal, electrical, and magnetic domains simultaneously. The laser vibrometer allows Magico to precisely target cabinet resonances, and the Klippel Near Field Scanner provides, for the first time, an accurate picture of the speaker’s bass performance. The new listening room is the last component of that chain, providing a reference standard that correlates back to the measurements and computer models. The computer modeling provides the theoretical underpinning of the design; the measurements the empirical performance; and the listening room the final voicing and aesthetic judgement of the loudspeaker.

I spent about eight hours listening to the M9 over two days. I heard the pair of M9s by themselves, and then augmented with two Magico Titan subwoofers ($32k each). Why would the massive M9 need a subwoofer? It doesn’t; the room needs the subwoofer, as do all rooms, even a reference-quality room such as the one in Magico’s factory. The multiple sources of bass distributed throughout the room drive the room’s resonant modes more uniformly for smoother and more linear low-end response.

Once the listening commenced, it was immediately apparent that the M9 was different from any other speaker I’ve heard, including previous Magico models. The sound had the remarkable quality of appearing from nowhere, completely untethered to the speakers. This characteristic was certainly related to the M9’s completely silent background as well as its stunning spatial presentation, with wide staging and continuousness of imaging. But the M9’s disappearing act went beyond these usual tropes. The impression of hearing music rather than a hi-fi system was profound. The M9 is so transparent to the music that I had the odd sensation of the speakers not being the source of the sound. Opening my eyes at the end of a piece of music, I was sometimes momentarily startled to see this pair of giants standing in front of me.

The M9 is utterly colorless; describing its specific sonic characteristics in terms of tonal balance, or what it does well and where it could be better, seems pointless; the speaker appears to have virtually no sound of its own. Magico has for years chased down one speaker-distortion mechanism after another, mechanisms that cue the brain that you are hearing a loudspeaker and not the actual musical event. With the M9, Magico has taken to the next level the concept of removing sonic artifacts, with stunning results.

The M9’s bass extension, power, and weight are, as might be expected from the design, exemplary. But the bottom end also has a clarity, definition, and warmth that extends from the upper bass all the way down to the bottom-most octave. The bass character doesn’t change with the register in which the instrument is playing, revealing nuances of texture and dynamics. Moreover, the bass—and the entire speaker—has a continuousness and coherence from top to bottom that further adds to the impression of not hearing a loudspeaker. Although capable of moving a massive amount of air and creating a visceral physicality in the low end, the M9 is a master of resolution and revealing fine details of timbre, dynamics, and pitch in bass instruments (try Brian Bromberg’s solo acoustic instrument on his album Wood, for example). The midbass is wonderfully warm, rich, and physically powerful, combining weight with transient fidelity and resolution.

The M9 sounds incredibly clean and pure but not antiseptic or clinical. In fact, the speaker is capable of conveying tremendous harmonic warmth and richness, if those qualities are present in the recording. The sound has a liquidity that is beguiling. The M9’s freedom from coloration and grain, coupled with its crystalline clarity, allows natural tone colors and textures to be rendered with a startlingly vivid realism. I listened to a lot of piano music through the M9, from solo classical, to jazz trios, to the instrument within larger ensembles, and heard some consistent and unmistakable qualities that loudspeakers rarely get right, and when they do, never to this degree. The attacks of hammers hitting the strings, particularly in the upper register, lacked the glassy “clangy” character that is so common in reproduced music. The M9 was utterly smooth and liquid, yet without diminishing the piano’s fierce sense of attack and percussive quality when called for. Second, the instrument had a harmonic warmth and density of texture that simply sounded more like the real thing. The resolution of the instrument’s harmonic structure was gorgeous and almost sensual; on sustained chords the tone colors were so vividly lifelike, rich, and dense in color. The M9 effortlessly resolved the way the harmonic structure subtly changed as those chords decayed. Reproduced piano often tends to sound a bit “skeletal,” with a hardness on the initial attack, a lack of body and warmth, and loss (or obscuration) of fine harmonic structure that casts a patina of artificiality over the instrument. Conversely, the instrument can sound a bit thick, confused, and turgid, lacking the sense of air radiating off the soundboard. The M9 didn’t veer in either direction of coloration, instead producing the most realistic reproduction of piano I’ve ever heard.

In the ability to resolve very fine detail, the M9 is, again, phenomenally great. I heard things in familiar recordings that were startling. The track “I Love Being Here with You” from Diana Krall’s Live in Paris (a terrific record, by the way), is a good example. During the piano solo, I heard, for the first time, some very quiet vocalizing underneath the music. This element added more life to the music, accentuating the live nature of the performance. But beyond this element of arcane audiophile interest, the song simply brimmed with the excitement of a first-rate band kicking into gear in front of an audience. All the performances took on a heightened sense of urgency, energy, and spontaneous music-making in a way that was absolutely thrilling.

The new generation of tweeter in the M9’s has taken another step forward in smoothness and lack of hardness. Even at high playback levels, with a large wind band playing at full tilt (the climax of “The Cowboys Overture” from John Williams at the Movies), the M9’s top end never veered into glare. In fact, the sound remained completely composed on this track, the densest fff passages rendered with a sense of ease, clarity, and lack of confusion. On small jazz groups, cymbals were reproduced with a delicacy and resolution of fine inner detail (e.g., Jack DeJohnette’s wonderfully sensitive playing on the title track to the live Keith Jarrett release My Foolish Heart). The purity and cleanliness of the treble fostered a sense of ease, of sinking into the music, with complete relaxation despite the system’s overarching quality of ultra-high resolution.

There’s one more aspect of the M9 to report; the speaker has a complete and unwavering sense of effortless ease on all music. It can scale the heights of the most demanding music without a hint of congestion or confusion. It’s just a natural, organic, immensely involving sound on any type of music and at any listening level.

Overall, I have to say that the Magico M9 is the best-sounding loudspeaker I’ve heard. It represents the ultimate realization of the accumulated knowledge and sophisticated technologies Magico has developed over the past 25 years, along with some remarkable innovations that push the M9’s performance to an unprecedented level.