News

As we announced last month, this past weekend saw the grand opening of EarsNova's new store at 3 East 28th Street, in Manhattan. Founded in 1979 by Joshua Cohn (right in photo), the store's new location is on the second floor of a solidly constructed 1920s building, with high ceilings and the space to present high-end audio products and systems under ideal circumstances. The listening rooms, for example, have floors and walls that are isolated from the building's structure. Not only does this prevent sound from the audio systems being demmed leaking into the other floors, it makes the rooms extremely quiet. When I was auditioning the new Magico Q1s during last Friday's evening rush hour, there was no clue that just half a block away there was the usual torrent of 5th Avenue traffic.

Magico's Alon Wolf (left in photo) was on hand to present the new Q1 stand-mounted speaker. Priced at $24,950/pair, the Q1 marries the beryllium-dome tweeter from the Q3 and Q5 floorstanders with a new 7" Nano-Tec–cone woofer. The sealed, hard-anodized aluminum enclosure is braced and damped to minimize resonances. Despite its relatively diminutive size—it measures 14.2" H by 9" W by 14.2" D—the Q1 weighs 60 lbs.

I auditioned the Q1s in the large room at EarsNova, with Boulder pre- and power amplification and a dCS Paganini two-box CD player, on a wide variety of music. While the bottom octave was missing, the Q1s did a terrific job at filling the room with tonally well-balanced sound, with no apparent dynamic limitations.

EarsNova's new store obviously represents a large investment on Joshua Cohn's part. As well as Magico, Boulder, dCS, the brands carried by EarsNova include Rockport, Rega, Basis, Viva, MySonic, and HRS.

In another Manhattan dealer news, In Living Stereo has also moved, to bigger premises at 2 Great Jones Street, while Andy Singer will soon be opening his new Sound by Singer showroom at 242 West 27th Street.