The Ultimate Magico

On passive display in the room adjoining their demonstration room was a single Magico Ultimate v.3 horn speaker, shown here with Magico's Alon Wolf for scale. A five-way design costing a mind-boggling $600,000/system, the speaker’s higher-frequency horns feature a Tractrix flare, the lower-midrange horn a trapezoidal flare, all of which blend smoothly into the baffle. A 15" sealed-box woofer handles frequencies below 125Hz.

Seen from behind, I was reminded of something I have felt for a long time: that a successful full-range horn speaker must be a multiway design, as a horn’s linear passband is relatively limited by the cutoff of the flare at the low-frequency end and by the internal reflections from the mouth of the horn at the high-frequency end.

COMMENTS
dalethorn's picture

$600k seems like a lot for loudspeakers (does 'system' mean 2 of those?), but they look very cool. I wonder how they'll approach reviews - shipping them out to reviewers, I'd think they would have to send several people along with the speakers just to insure correct setup.

drblank's picture

Yeah, I think that's per pair.  The amount of tooling and just getting big enough slabs of billet aluminum is costly.  They certainly are weird (in a cool way) looking.  I'm sure they sound great, but as they say.   They aren't for everyone.

I think these ultra expensive systems are meant more for pushing technology/engineering to their highest level and then if the concept, etc. is successful, sometimes they can scale it down for smaller budgets and smaller rooms. I would not put these things in a small room.  But these would probably sound great in a decent sized room that only a small number of homes actually have.    Either way, they certainly can grab attention to the company due to all of the publicity they are getting.  That's another side effect these types of speakers do.  Nothing wrong with that.

corrective_unconscious's picture

He looks like Lux Luthor standing next to that thing, but then who wouldn't?

It's a bit like Thiel, though for reasons of play in this case, I assume, in being a complete design departure from everything he's been doing over the past years.

Jason Victor Serinus's picture

Alon Wolf's first speakers were horns. As for Jim Thiel, he is no longer with us.

corrective_unconscious's picture

You can say that about Thiel again, for sure. No longer with us.

The first Magico speakers were horns, or his first speakers he designed after getting his driver's license were horns?

I guess then I should have said his box speakers were the departure from his oeuvre.

Anyway, apart from my nitpicking, I don't much like the look of the horns. They might be fun to hear someday, though.

otaku's picture

I completely mis-read it.  I thought it was $600K for the speakers with the amps and source equipment and cables and whatnot. If the speakers alone are $600K, then you are looking at something close to a million bucks for a complete system.

Regadude's picture

That speaker looks like something Wile E Coyote would use to catch the road runner. 

600 000$ for a pair... If someone pays 600K for this, they don't have a pair...

drblank's picture

Don't worry, they aren't mfging these things as fast as $200 bookshelf speakers.  

If I was a kagillionaire, I might buy a pair and obviously would need a room big enough. What else is there to do with that kind of money?

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