Description
Magico S7 loudspeakers for sale, Includes free shipping within Canada / USA
(USA clients will need there own broker for duties and importing fees)
Local taxes extra
1 owner and very well looked after, we have the original crates , available for audition at our store.
Absolute Sound review
Magico S7
In some ways, the better a speaker is, the harder it is to review, and this is especially true of a speaker that is clearly designed to be as accurate and neutral as possible. The Magico S7 meets all of these criteria. It is one of the best speakers I have ever encountered. It provides an exceptional level of detail at every frequency with every form of music, and it has a neutral timbre that is not affected by any reasonable level of dynamic contrasts from the deep bass to beyond any rational definition of human hearing.
The practical problem is that such words don’t really describe the most critical aspects of the Magico S7’s performance in actual listening. The ability to resolve detail without exaggeration is always relative, and the only way to really understand the exact level of performance is to hear a given speaker perform over a wide range of music.
Anyone who has evaluated high-end audio equipment knows that the subtler aspects of audible superiority often require you to actually hear and conclude that one really good speaker is clearly superior to another really good speaker in given areas. This make it even harder to describe the S7’s level of excellence, as the speaker costs some $58,000.( US Dollar) The S7 may not be the top of the Magico line, but it has to be compared against some of the best speakers in the world and judged a major investment.
Moreover, reviewer ego aside, deciding on the best of the best in any given price category is difficult to impossible. There are no ways to legitimately rank really great speakers in written words, given the problems in judging nuances in sound, valid real-world differences in taste, and the problem of somehow weighting different aspects of sound quality. In practice, the real issue is whether a given speaker is good enough to be one of the best of the best, and be judged as such, even at a price level where true excellence is the price of admission for a given speaker to even be considered.
That is still an extremely demanding standard to attempt to address in words, and fortunately the Magico S7 is a really great speaker! It represents one of the leading efforts at speaker design and innovation I’ve ever been exposed to. It builds on past Magico models to which my colleagues have given almost universally excellent reviews, and it combines an emphasis on technology with an equal emphasis on listening to the result. Both efforts pay off in every aspect of the S7’s performance. The proof is still in the actual listening and not in my words, but I would hope that reading the review will convince you that the S7 deserves the high-end equivalent of a Michelin three-star rating: “Exceptional, worth a special journey”.
The Sound and the Music
Now, having carefully expressed my caveats about the value of words relative to actual listening, let me try to use them to explain the sound of excellence. I’ve already talked about imaging and soundstage. The S7 cannot turn a poor or mediocre recording into a great one, but it can reveal an immense amount of fine soundstage detail from the lowest to the highest levels without altering timbre, exaggerating any given area of response like the upper midrange, or emphasizing the mids and highs at the expense of the bass.
The Fry Street Quartet’s recording of Haydn’s String Quartets in D Minor, Op. 9, No. 4 and in F Major, Op. 77, No. 2 is a good case in point [Fry Street Quartet]. This is not particularly dynamic music, but it does have considerable complexity, and so the ability to provide a realistic soundstage with great detail is critical. You become involved in the music to the extent it comes alive, creates the impression that the musicians are somehow in the room, and allows you to hear each of the musicians interact in credible ways. Ray Kimber’s recording makes this possible, but then so does the Magico S7.
Bruce Dunlap’s About Home [Chesky] is another example of a recording where soundstage detail and proper timbre are critical, but it does provide an unusual and exceptionally complex mix of guitar, saxophone, and percussion—almost to the point where it seems designed to be a demonstration recording. It also has a lot of high-frequency detail in the percussion and deep bass from the bass guitar. A lot of speakers slightly blur some aspects of this detail, lose image specificity, or emphasize some aspect of sound quality over others. The S7 doesn’t, but it also is not “revealing” in the sense that you suddenly hear some aspect of the music emphasized in ways that are not natural.
Technology
Technological complexity and sophistication are key aspects of the Magico S7. Like any speaker that comes close to the S7 in price and quality, the S7’s exceptional performance has a solid technological base, one that puts the lie to any notion that dynamic speakers are less complex—or easier to design and make—than ribbons, electrostatics, or exotic designs.
Let me stress that any designer who is seeking to push the state of the art is going to be passionate about his own design choices, that I am not a speaker designer who can judge given approaches to design, and that decades of experience have taught me that remarkably different technologies and designs can all be outstanding. I do hope, however, that Alon Wolf of Magico’s passion and commitment help illustrate both the reasons this particular design is so good and why a speaker of this quality costs what it does.
I can also say based on my long experience in a very different field of technology and manufacturing that a visit to the Magico production line and listening room, and a detailed examination of the drivers, crossover, and enclosure parts and assembly, showed me how much effort, time, tooling, research and development, and total product cost are involved in the kind of production that takes place at the very top of the high end. You do end up paying more for diminishing returns, but that is the price of excellence in every field, and the key reason why you are reading magazine called The Absolute Sound.
You can find out a lot about both the S7 and its level of technology and manufacturing by going to the Magico website (magico.net), but I asked the S7’s chief designer, Alon Wolf, a number of questions that I felt the website didn’t fully cover, and he provided the following answers.
But the S7 is scarcely a speaker for “smaller music.” One of my friends pushed some Rolling Stones recordings to the limit and beyond, but to the extent they had detail and power, the S7s provided it at volumes I would not personally recommend, although I did not allow him to see if he could raise the volume to limits I find painful. More functionally, the S7s did allow me to get as much detail out of symphonic and opera recordings as I’ve ever heard in my listening room—even with truly complex music like the Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 and the Mahler Eighth.
These works are both so sonically massive that they tend to saturate even the best speakers, and every recording made of both has limits when it comes to reproduction in the home (and is to also some extent a subject of controversy as to musical performance). However, if you compare the older Telarc performance of the Saint-Saëns with the much newer Reference Recordings version by Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony [RR-136] as reproduced by the S7 in comparison with other speakers, you’ll get a clear indication of just how good the S7’s resolving power is—even with massively complex and loud music.
I would normally go on to comment individually on the treble, midrange, and bass. The practical problem, however, is that I cannot find something to criticize in timbre, dynamics, or detail from the highest frequencies down to the deep bass. I would say that if you audition this speaker, it may initially appear to be a little soft in the upper octaves. It isn’t.
It not only measures very well in the upper octaves in a real-world listening room and consistently from the midrange to beyond hearing, but its flat, smooth response and consistently high level of detail can be a bit misleading. What it lacks are the kinds of peaks and anomalies in the mid and upper midrange that often emphasize the hardness and excessive upper-octave information in closely miked recordings—particularly of violin and of soprano voices that are allowed to push the microphone’s limits.
The S7 is not forgiving. It won’t “fix” recordings with these problems by covering them up with a touch of warmth. What the S7 will do is be musically and accurately revealing without adding the kind of subtle coloration that exacerbates problems in a recording and contributes to listening fatigue in the process.
This pays off with all musical styles, but if you happen to be a fan of Baroque music, and particularly of Telemann and Vivaldi—or any music with dominant upper strings, brass, woodwinds, or soprano voice—you are going to find its mix of accurate timbre and detail to be exceptionally appealing. You can also hear the subtle differences between really good modern digital recordings more clearly, although I generally find overall recording quality to matter more than the number of bits or sampling frequency.
The only other comment I can make before I turn to the deep bass is that this is all achieved with an exceptionally flat response. There is no forgiving drop in the area around 3kHz, or any effort to add warmth. I do have to admit that far too many recordings today go for apparent detail with close miking, and there is something to be said for tuning the speaker to make it more musically convincing with such recordings. The problem with any such changes to flat response, however, is that they affect great recordings negatively and that any fixed attempt to color a speaker to make it more musical can interact so much with the listening position, room, and other factors that it can tip the balance towards softening the wrong things too much.
An accurate speaker can present some problems with colored recordings, but a colored speaker does not solve them. I’ve heard some adjustable and defeatable forms of electronic compensation offer much better solutions—like those in the new Legacy Wavelet—but I’d choose the accuracy of the S7 every time.
And this brings me to the deep bass. The S7s do not go down to the absolute floor of the bass, although they do go far deeper at musically natural volumes in the real world than most speakers. (Magico had to have some reasons for its far more expensive Q7s.) They do go far deeper, however, than may be apparent if you are used to speakers that lack their bass transient response. They have remarkably tight and natural deep bass with far more bass detail than many competing speakers even in this general price range.
One problem for some audiophiles, however, is that if they are looking for room-shaking bass, or used to less tight and well-defined bass, they may not realize how much really low bass performance they are actually getting. One very good test of the S7’s ability to provide both detail and real-world deep bass power is Band One (“Fanfare for the Common Man”) of the Eiji Oue, Minnesota Orchestra recording of Copland 100 [Reference Recordings], which has superb bass drum and brass passages in which transient response and definition are critical.
The second test is the ability to really make the organ into both a subtle and immensely powerful deep-bass instrument. This was clear in listening to the Jean Guilou’s recording of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition [Dorian], especially on Bands Two, Thirteen, and Fourteen. Far too many other speakers—even expensive ones—do not reproduce the organ as well as they do other instruments. The end result is that a vast library of organ music, dating back to the days when it dominated liturgical music and popular listening, tends to be ignored. I doubt the S7 alone can produce an organ renaissance (pun intended), but it does reveal the complexity and subtlety of the instrument and not just its power and deep-bass energy.
The S7’s accuracy in transient speed and overall detail not only makes the deep bass more musically realistic; it also significantly reduces room excitation and the masking of detail in the upper bass and midrange. These advantages of superior bass performance come through clearly on high-quality cello and bass viol recordings. Try the opening passages of the Kuijken Kwartet recording of the Mozart Requiem [Challenge Classics], and track one of Ray Brown and Laurindo Almeida’s Moonlight Serenade [Jeton]. In fact, virtually any really good cello or jazz recording that emphasizes the bass will do just as well.
