A recent conversation on one of the Internet audio forums revolved around a user’s question about whether his system should provide a “front row” or “center orchestra” perspective on the recordings he played through it. Not surprisingly, the responses were wide-ranging and fully supported my frequent observation that what is “good”, “better” or “best” depends entirely upon precisely what one seeks. Some folks want their system to provide a certain perspective. My own contention is that if the system provides a certain perspective, whatever that perspective might be, it is in fact getting in the way of the perspective provided by the recording. I would rather have a system that just gets out of the way and lets me hear past it, all the way to the recording.
About this time last year, I wrote an entry in this blog called Can you hear what you’re doing? and said it would be the first in a series written with the hope of helping musicians and other recordists who are interested, like myself, in studio setups that avoid superimposing their own sonic thumbprint on the signals they reproduce. It is my hope that these will be of equal interest to any music and sound enthusiast who wants maximum access to the recordings in their music collection. In that entry, I talked in general terms about monitoring system setup and went on in the subsequent entry to discuss room acoustics. Here, we’ll get into the loudspeakers themselves and one design in particular, Jim Winey’s Magneplanars.
I have always felt the most important component in any studio or listening room is the monitoring (i.e., the loudspeakers and their setup). Before I had my own studio, I would select places to work based solely on the monitoring, my feeling being if you can’t hear what you’re doing, nothing else really matters. Every decision in record making, from microphone selection on, is based on what the monitors reveal (or don’t). Similarly, when building any listening system, it is the monitoring that will determine what we hear from the rest of the playback chain and the recordings we listen to.
Some speakers can sound “very good”, presenting certain aspects of the sound in very pleasing ways. They might be sweet in the treble or very powerful in the bass or they might exhibit great dynamic “slam” when the music suddenly goes from quiet to loud. Some will favor the human voice. Some will be especially good at reproducing a sense of spaciousness. Personally, I wouldn’t want any of these. I consider a loudspeaker (or any other component) that sounds “very good” to be a source of distortion. I don’t want the speakers to favor any particular aspect of the sound and thus draw my attention to it. I don’t want the speakers to “sound” at all. I want the opposite: I want them to get out of the way and let me hear the recording.
When many folks see Magnepans for the first time, they tend to say things like “That’s a speaker?!” These are not your usual cones-in-a-box like most other speakers. Maggies—as they are affectionately known to their fans—are flat panels that radiate sound from both the front and the back. Instead of using cones (or domes) as the driver elements, they utilize Magnepan’s proprietary flat drivers. Lightweight and fast-responding, these drivers excel at following the music signal with an agility those more massive cones (and domes) can’t achieve. The first models I experienced, back in the early 1970s, looked like Shoji screens. While those early models did not have the bass or treble extension of the modern Maggies, they nonetheless provided a shockingly realistic portrayal of the music and showed just how much more music was available from records than what is commonly revealed by typical box speakers. Over the years, the designs have been improved greatly, extending their reach into the bass and up into the treble, and expanding their responsiveness to changes in musical dynamics. The larger models incorporate a true ribbon tweeter, extending the range into the stratosphere and providing a purity in the treble which, to my ears, remains unmatched to this day.
I have set up systems for many clients, friends and relatives built around Magnepan’s MMG model. While it does not have the bass or treble extension or the overall resolution of models higher up in the line, this least expensive model in the Magnepan line ($599/pair) delivers a good measure of the Maggie Magic. I know of one studio that replaced a pair of box type monitors with MMGs and the changes that resulted were profound. (The owner never went back to boxes and has since purchased larger Magnepans to use as the studio monitors.) While they may not plumb the deepest notes in the bass, their definition in this range sounds to me a lot more like bass in real life than that delivered by other designs. Assuming the recording contains it, there is real pitch definition and speed on the bottom, something I’ve only heard approached by speakers costing much more.
I’ve heard some $10,000 and $15,000 speakers that have so much “personality” they end up exhausting the listener and engendering headaches. MMGs, within their capabilities, just sound like what they are fed. Properly set up, they are a joy that any music lover will intuitively recognize. For this reason, I’ve come to refer to them as “The People’s Speaker”. While enjoyable music systems can be built around less expensive loudspeakers, I wouldn’t want to use such for evaluating recordings or other gear. For a system that I can trust when making records, a system that can truly get out of the way, I consider the MMGs the starting point. (More on this in a future entry.)
Earlier this decade, Magnepan introduced its model 1.7, successor to the 1.6, itself the successor to the 1.5, which was the first Maggie I owned. Unlike many other companies, Magnepan does not introduce new models very often. Like other companies I admire, rather than arbitrarily replace products with others that incorporate superficial changes, they wait for really significant design improvements before offering a new model. My old 1.5s used the planar magnetic driver for the woofer and incorporated Magnepan’s quasi-ribbon driver for the midrange/tweeter section of the speaker. The 1.6s used a similar driver complement but over the years Magnepan enlarged the quasi-ribbon and redesigned the crossover as well as some aspects of the mechanical design of the speaker. This increased its already fine coherence and its dynamic capability. With the .7 series, Magnepan extended the use of its quasi-ribbon drivers to the bass and again improved the crossover, resulting in a substantial upgrade to an already fine design.
My 1.5s were not only used for leisure listening, they became indispensable as the monitors in my studio, making mastering decisions faster and easier. This is a critical point and why I insist on monitoring that is absolutely trustworthy. I spoke about this a bit in the blog entry cited earlier. In most studios, one has to take the result outside to another system in order to “see how it sounds”. The sound has effectively been adjusted to make the studio monitoring sound “right”, with the inevitable outcome that the sound isn’t so right when played elsewhere. With Maggies serving as monitors, I feel confident I’m hearing—and working on—the recording itself, not the monitoring. Their honesty makes the results stand up when played elsewhere on other systems.
In the intervening years, I’ve gone from using 1.5s in the studio, to using Magnepan’s 3.6s, and more recently, to 3.7s. I consider the .7 to be a landmark in the progress of Magnepan’s designs with a new level of coherence, which I attribute to the crossover changes. The word that keeps coming to mind as I listen to them is “solidity” as the images presented by the speakers now seem to have a palpability, a sense of real presence that can sometimes be scarily real sounding—if the recording allows it.
There are other Magnepan models, both smaller and larger than those I’ve mentioned so far. I believe each of them is a best buy in its price class. The only caveats I would offer the reader are the following:
- These speakers are so transparent, some folks will blame them for issues the speakers are simply revealing about the recording, the rest of the system, or the setup.
- Maggies like a lot of current and should be used with amplifiers capable of delivering what the speakers want. To my ears, low-powered amplifiers will not elicit their magic.
- While all speakers require proper placement to do their job, a speaker as revealing as a Maggie really needs air all around it to show its potential. For background listening, they can be moved closer to the wall behind them but to really have them “disappear”, they should be well out into the room. This is true for almost all speakers and in my experience, is certainly a prerequisite if the speaker is to truly get out of the way.
I’ve had the good fortune to hear other great speakers but so far, all of them cost an order of magnitude more than any Magnepan. Yes, for $50,000, $100,000 and more, there are some really fantastic loudspeakers out there. To this day however, there are still some things I think Maggies do better, even at a small fraction of the price. And for overall performance, few in my experience are so chameleon-like as far as the signal they are fed, so elegant visually, and so inviting to the listener: my favorite product in all of audio.
The Soundkeeper 