Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

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, Columbia), the MBL amps kept superb control of the Magicos' woofers without sacrificing 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 competing 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 files, 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 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 conflicts 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 between 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 on this CD sounded very even at the listening position. However, listening to the speaker enclosures with a stethoscope, I could hear, on the sidewalls 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 Zander'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 recording: 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 Elgar'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 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 transparency 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 transferred to digital a cassette recording of a 1981 chamber-music concert in which I performed my own transcription for bass recorder of Rachmaninoff'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 instrument: 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 system, the better it can transport the listener 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 Up
My congratulations to Magico's Alon Wolf and Yair Tammam for producing a speaker that offers full-range, uncolored, 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 G3 Giya ($39,990/pair), which I reviewed in December 2013 and March 2014, respectively (footnote 1). The Magico S5 Mk.II joins those speakers as ones 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.

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Footnote 1: Prices quoted were those current when these speakers were reviewed.