Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Now there's a Magneplanar speaker to fill the price gap between the $2000 MGIIIa and the $1225 MGIIc. The '2.5/R is priced almost exactly midway between them, which explains the unusual model number.

Like all the other single-panel Magneplanars, these are attractive enough in appearance to be surprisingly unobtrusive in the room, despite their imposing 6' height. Apart from the wooden endcheeks, they are covered with fabric grille all the way around, which could be a cosmetic liability as well as an asset: Domestic cats love to climb up fabric stretched tightly over wood (as at the bases of these) and, given the opportunity, will have these speakers in shreds in no time. Magnepan recommends spray-on cat repellent; I have to tell them that some cats don't seem to mind its odor as much as most people do.

It is almost ten years since I last heard a pair of DCM loudspeakers, the Time Windows made famous by writer Peter Aczel in the first incarnation of his magazine The Audio Critic. The "Time" nomenclature traditionally used by DCM in their models refers to the fact that for any hi-fi component, its performance in the frequency domain is related to, and implicit in, that in the time domain, the two being connected by the mathematics of the Fourier Transform. To put it in simplistic language, a speaker's impulse response can be translated directly into its frequency response: all the information needed to show how its response varies with frequency is contained in the shape of the impulse it produces.

The Swedish Rauna company, which has been in existence for about five years—their little Mk.II Tyr two-way impressed J. Gordon Holt a couple of years back in Vol.9 No.2—appears to be dedicated to the use of concrete as an enclosure material. One of the problems with conventional wooden cabinets is that the walls flex and vibrate, adding a spurious and often time-delayed output at some frequencies. It has even been reported that in extreme cases, the contribution of the cabinet to the overall sound at some frequencies approaches that from the drive-units. In theory, concrete should give a rigid construction with any panel resonant frequencies moved up above the critical midrange.

When JA suggested I review one of the "smaller" VMPS loudspeakers, I felt the hot breath of controversy in the air. The recent">http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/44">recent debate in these pages concerning the "proper" amount of bass required for true high-fidelity reproduction, and the inability of small loudspeakers (according to one camp) to provide it, hadn't yet cooled off, nor showed any sign of doing so. VMPS, a small West-Coast manufacturer most famous for its humongous Super Tower IIa/R (at 6-plus feet and 250 lbs per side, first">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/486vmps">first reviewed for Stereophile by AHC in Vol.9 No.3 and the latest version of which is examined by JGH elsewhere in this issue), is hardly a fence-sitter in the debate; they are clearly pro-low-end response. I chose to request the Tower II/R, an upgraded version of the smallest of their floor-standing systems, for review; with a rated 3dB-down point of 22Hz (the same as their standard subwoofer), it's not exactly a member of the restrained bass brigade.

PSB is a small, Toronto-based manufacturer that has been collaborating with Canada's National Research Council to try and take some of the guesswork, some would say magic, out of loudspeaker design.

The NRC, financed by the Canadian government, does basic research in many technological areas and makes its findings available to any firm wishing to use them. (Most other countries provide or encourage this kind of government/business cooperation. It is against the law in the US, to our great disadvantage.) The NRC's audio division, headed by physicist Dr. Floyd E. Toole, has devoted the last several years to the rather formidable task of defining, and assigning numbers to, the various aspects of loudspeaker performance that affect listeners' subjective assessments of their sound.

I am puzzled. No, really. I know you find it hard to believe that we sacerdotes of the golden-eared persuasion could ever be perplexed, but I have been pondering the imponderables of ports. Ever since the classic work of Richard Small and Neville Thiele in the early '70s showed how the low-frequency response of any box loudspeaker can be modeled as an electrical high-pass filter of some kind, with the relevant equations and data made available to all, there would seem to be very little reason why all loudspeakers with the same extension should not sound alike (or at least very similar) below 100Hz. Yet after reviewing 20 dynamic loudspeakers (and using 24) in the same room over the last seven months, I am led to the conclusion that speakers vary as much in the quality of their mid-to-upper bass as they do in any other region. A few are dry, more are exaggerated in this region; some are detailed and "fast," most are blurred, with the upper bass "slow" (by which I mean that the weight of bass tone seems to lag behind the leading edges of the sound).

So far, as part of my quest to find good affordable box loudspeakers, I have reviewed 16 models, in the August, October, and November 1987 issues of Stereophile (Vol.10 Nos.5, 7, & 8). This fourth group of loudspeakers expands the price range covered, down to $329/pair and up to $1349/pair, and includes one model from California (Nelson-Reed), one from Canada (Paradigm), and one, Monitor Audio's "flagship," the R952MD, from the UK.