Thanks for the great review. I have been a subscriber of the Absolute Sound magazine for around a decade and my Dad before he passed was a subscriber since the mid seventies. I used to read his magazines as well. Thanks for all that you do.
Over the past 30 years or so, I tried horn, electrostatic and ribbon speakers. In the end, I went right back to conventional, cone-in-a-box speakers, and for the same reasons described here in the review. Great review.
@@kenmcglown6642 Guess I should have stated up, I'm not an average American worker. As of now I'm 73.years old and retired from that rat race. Was a plain old factory worker 95%.of my working life. Never bothered me a bit that I never madethose kind of wages. The most that I ever made was about $40k a year. And pretty much had to live in a large city to make that kind of money. He'll in the smaller town I'm from factories still fuss and fight over having to pay people more than %15-20 an hour and that's after you've been there 7-8 years. But still never cared to have to be any thing more than a working stiff. I always made enough to live on and through time gradually build up my system to about a $40k 2channel system and about a $14k home theater system. Both of which I get tremendous enjoyment out of. But like I said I would never spend a million dollars on a system Big time law of diminishing returns. Have a good day!
First and foremost, Tom, I really appreciate your attempts at vivid articulation in your reviews. They are usually most informative and you've really developed a knack at making them interesting for informed audiophiles. In the case of this review (immediately following your discussion of "vivid"), you begin describing sound qualities that are so dependent upon listening rooms, equipment set-up, and recordings being played back, it is hard to delineate how much of your superlatives actually relate to the speakers themselves. No doubt these are very fine speakers and I'm not attempting to impugn in any manner. I'm really just saying that 1) at the high-end, systems become more and more dependent upon the recordings they are playing back, associated equipment and the rooms they are playing in and 2) one would really have to be able to calibrate with your own listening room and familiar recordings in order to assign superlatives to the speakers themselves. Please keep up the good work! I enjoy your reviews!
These are all issues, certainly. "The problem of recording standards" is one of our 6 major issues facing audio. That said, the number of good recordings is impressively large. The associated equipment helps with the results for sure, but my experience is that particular equipment is less critical to the results I describe than the basic quality level of the supporting gear. I'm working on a project in this area, but so far I'm finding streamers that are at a level of goodness where I could live with most of them, and DACs that are in the same boat, and amps that are like this, etc. Sure, I might prefer one over another (and you might prefer a different one), but "electronic signal purity" has evolved to a point where, at the high end, different good products aren't make or break as far as believability goes. The same is not true of speakers or rooms. I think room treatment and room correction are one of the final audio frontiers, though that is partially due to reservations audio listeners seem to have about room treatment, coupled with the need for professional design service (people seem to dislike paying for services). For a speaker like the M7, I cover it under the assumption that the user will have a well-treated room. Under that assumption, I think what I've reported will hold up pretty well across rooms. My room and Magico's room are different in treatment, but they sound quite similar in many ways because the basic principles being applied are the same and aimed at similar calibration. Hope that helps.
I'd also like to add: good results in at least one situation means that something must be right; bad results in one situation might mean circumstances might need to change before judgement can be made.
Good Review Tom! I especially appreciated the comparison/benefits from the speakers in the $25-$100K/$100-$25K and what you DO get from investing in the M7 price range.
I do too (I don't have Rockports but I have heard them) Rockports seem to me more dynamic without the slightest glare and I MUCH prefer the engineering in their construction compared to IMHO the ludicrous use of literally HUNDREDS of fasteners in the Magico models which goes so completely against the KISS principle of design. Rockport does not aluminium for their enclosures which in my estimation requires a whole LOT of careful use of VERY effective damping materials to eliminate the inherent ringing associated with aluminium speakers. That and I feel that Magico overprices their gear due to their badge recognition. Just saying :-) Happy listening !
Thanks for this review which really was refreshing because it was based on real knowledge and understanding of how to design a loudspeaker and what is important. Will follow... Alon Wolf is probably THE best of the five best loudspeaker designers worth listening to.
This was another terrific review. I really like the general approach of these reviews, which is “ why this product?” What’s special about this product that makes it worthy of extended discussion? Not just another piece of gear review . This is one thing I always liked about Robert E Greene’s reviews in TAS. He always made it clear at the outfit why he had selected that particular speaker or piece of gear to discuss. What specific unique or informative feature made that piece of gear somehow important. And I think Tom is doing an excellent job articulating the rationale behind all the design choices, as well as the Sonic results.
REG is a gem. Keep him in your heart or prayers -- his house burned completely to the ground in the LA fires. He and his family (and his violins!) are safe, but he has a tough road ahead.
Mmmm . . . this was highly interesting! Magico DOES push the state of the art but for a cost. I HAVE heard the M7's and they ARE lovely. I have also heard Dynaudio's Confidence 50 speakers at ONE SEVENTH the cost of the M7's . The 50's do NOT go QUITE as "low" as the M7's - but I would literally have to have the two speakers side by side to be able to suss the extremely subtle differences they MAY have in terms of a quality experience - let's face it: when it comes to the ABSOLUTE SOUND we really ARE ALL chasing our tails to a certain extent because no matter HOW much we spend on recreating music in our homes we will ALWAYS hear the difference between that and a live performance 🙂
In a really very informal "survey" I made showing the XVX speaker to girl friends and wives of audio hobby friends not ONE would want an XVX speaker anywhere NEAR their home LOL That plus if you tune into Danny's TH-cam's at GR Research you might come away rethinking Wilson's approach to design and sound . . . just saying :-)
this is so interesting and weird at the same time. i'm reading the comments below, and noticed that most of the guys don't mention the price as they're are totally OK with that !!!. a pair of these cost 375.000.00 Dollars !. not 350 bucks... are they embarrassed to say anything ?. but rather they pretended to act cool . oh sure that's some chump change . money no object 😁🙄... i wonder how many here can afford to buy a pair of these speakers ?!?!?!? . are they worth the money?. absolutely not.. they sure are GREAT Speakers. however, WE ALL KNOW that the mark--up on audio equipment is HUGE. and the losses you take when you sell them is HUGE as well. i bet the value of these in the used market in a couple of years will be worth Half of their cost.. anyways. THANK YOU Tom for the review .
You have NO idea to what degree I so AGREE with you! Even FIFTY thousand dollars is humongous money compared to the Magicos here in question at $350 K USD and even though I don't have a pair of Dynaudio Confidence 50 speakers priced at 50 thousand CAD I've heard them and to me, they easily compare to these M7's at SEVEN TIMES the price. Not only that I really wonder at the use of aluminium in certain of Magico's models and in some of their models they use literally HUNDREDS of metal fasteners. !!! This is engineering gone amuck if you ask me :-) Anyway as you say this IS interesting and weird at the same time - it seems that society has become inured to simply irrational parameters of what constitutes "value" and the relative cost of for example a pair of speakers to a HOUSE! I mean in certain areas of the USA and Canada one can buy a pretty nice house for 350 thousand dollars not counting tax. Oh well . . . I give up LOL To be devil's advocate for a moment, firms like Magico DO push the boundaries of what's possible in sound recreation but then again so too does a firm in France (Diptyque) that creates state of the art Magnepan beating speakers for a FRACTION of Magico's prices. Go figure :-) Let's have fun listening to OUR "reasonable" gear right? LOL
Apparently the listening test was done at the Magico facility in Northern California, instead of Tom's listening room. I say interesting, because Tom normally uses an Audio Research Reference 6SE tube preamp, while the Magico listening room is all solid state using a Solution 727 Preamplifier priced at $78K. I wonder what Tom would say about the sound of the M7 using the Audio Research tub pre-amp.
For clarity, I also use the MBL N51 (solid-state) in listening room 2. And DACs direct to amplifiers. My major consistent finding in comparing tube and solid-state front ends is in imaging. There can be tonal balance differences, but the ARC seems not to be designed for that (although it has higher output impedance than most SS designs so if you use the ‘wrong’ cables you could create a low pass filter). Then logically, not observationally, there is the 10,000:1 difference in magnitude between speaker and electronic distortions. That ‘should’ mean that the M7s would do what they do with many good front ends. As a sort of accidental test of this, we played tape and it was tape-like but digital showed what the speakers can do just as well. Same result with red book and high res digital. I would worry more that the Magico room is part of the result, but listening room 2 is calibrated to similar standards. I hope I was clear that a speaker like this needs to be in a well-treated room to do its thing.
No indeed. Only pointing out that sources with different characters didn’t alter the fundamental nature of things that I enumerated as basics of this speaker system. But when we switched speakers to a S model, the change was significant. This only suggests the secret of much of the sound via the M7 isn’t this particular electronics stack. But if you want to know how the M7 sounds with a specific tube preamp, I don’t know. The tape system did use a tube preamp, fwiw.
I looked for a review about sonus faber il cremonese on absolute sound. And when I saw something it basically was a press release issued by sonus. Did you ever review this speaker and I know it goes back a number of years?
Tom please consider a video expanding the "believability" factor and the associated recommended equipment. Perhaps these would be indicators for what to hope to achieve for us from a more experienced listener. Thank you.
Good idea. It isn't complicated, so here is the short version. We use the sound of real instruments in real space (the absolute sound) as a reference for evaluating equipment (we aren't tell ing you what we like, we are telling you what things sound like). This reference is used because over the decades we have found that getting closer to this reference gives better musical satisfaction. For a long time, we referred to the objective of audio at home as being "accurate reproduction". But we can't exactly know this, because we don't know the exact placement of performers or the exact settings of their amps or the exact instruments they play etc. But knowing the sound of real instruments in real space, we can pretty well judge when stereo delivers a 'believable' version of real instruments in real space. 'Believable' then just means the sound has no obvious distracting distortions that tell you it is being reproduced badly. The equipment sounds like it's sound might be real or accurate (and, again, we can't know accuracy exactly). This is a model for a system (stereo at home) that aims at identifying ~large distortions. Of which there are many. For more, see our Methodology paper in the Audiopedia section of The Absolute Sound website.
@@keithgregson9573 Hope it was clear that ‘lack of coloration’ indicates minimal distortion of the incoming signal. It suggests a voicing with low deviation from the absolute sound (musical test signals that function as knowable references for judging distortion). It is hard to write about what is not there (though we did it for the M7). So, voicing descriptions generally cover the deviations chosen by the designers and their magnitude. The possibly unfortunate element of this is the unintended implication that deviations are desirable. You may want them, but many listeners do not.
The perforated black panels are the vents on the top of the amplifiers, if that is what you're looking at. No subs were used in this system, although Magico keeps subs (in the corners) for other demonstrations.
Interesting to hear about like a super car is. I wonder how something like Vivid audio would compare with less money spend in the cabinet but with a different approach. Anyway am 100% in the horn camp now but think about buying a wide dispersion speakers (magico, Vivid) as a second pair from time to time.
Tom I sure enjoyed your well done video and your thorough explanations. I don’t see myself popping 300 K for the speakers or a Lamborghini for that matter as the real cost would be from the divorce court. Thanks keep up the good work
People complain about the price, but understand that there are 30,000 people in the world who have investable assets of at least $100 million, and 625,000 people with assets of least $30 million worldwide, so that the price of these speakers (and associated equipment) is no big deal to these wealthy people. No one is suggesting the average person go out and buy these speakers.
Tom hasn't heard the M9. In basic sonic flavoring, or lack of it, Alon says they are similar. Certainly in the S series, the S2, S3 and S5 are obviously related allowing a choice based on room size, preferred output levels and bottom octave capability. The M9 has some bass control features that seem valuable. He also says that moving from something like the M7 to the M9, if you don't have calibrated listening room acoustics, might be the wrong allocation of funds. Of course one can have both with the right budget. Good luck!
oh, you. how relatable! i will keep this in mind the next time i have $375k for speakers. thats what i love about you, always giving valuable insight that the "everyman" can appreciate. the overwrought and flowery descriptions really sell me on it.
@@iampuzzleman282 No idea how many will be sold. 20 pairs per year would be a sizable business in high-end audio terms. We also don’t know the BOM. But again, you get to a typical high end BOM pretty quickly with multiple components costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, plus CNCing 400 lb billets for multiple panels, plus custom CF cabinets, plus custom drivers. Then as you say you have R&D, and also overhead (space and leasing for CNC machines, the listening room, warehouse, test rooms, finish space, offices, sales people, marketing people, service people). And the cost of the dealer network.
I did hear this M7 a while ago together with the Vendersteen Model 7. While the M7 was a good speaker it could not in a million year compete with the Model 7 from Vandersteen. This Vandersteen Model 7 is most likely THE best speaker in the world right now (Jan 2025).
And IF same loudspeaker compny could compete with Wandersteen it might be Martin, not Magico. The only advantage Magico have above Martin is that Magico is produced in USA, and Martin is not.
Tom, Let me correct you. You said in your intro that the M7 will appeal to "knowledgeable music lovers”. I think you meant to say that it will appeal to “wealthy music lovers”. There are plenty of knowledgeable music lovers that would love to own the M7s, but if they aren’t also wealthy, they won’t own them.
Sure. Maybe the first part of this sentence wasn't clear: "And even allowing for price and appropriate budget, the M7 will mainly appeal to knowledgeable music lovers."
$375K a pair is crazy. Of course it’s a deal compared to their $750K speakers. I think I’ll pass on these and keep my house instead. Speakers for the Elons and Bezos of the world. You aren’t responsible for the pricing. Thanks for the review.
I subscribed to TAS and others back in the '90s, and just recently resubbed to them and Stereophile. Back then there was some equipment that seemed extremely expensive to me and well beyond my means, but I enjoyed reading about it, and many of the other things I actually had a chance to own if I worked it right. But now it has gone beyond ludicrous with things like these speakers. This isn't for audiophiles, it's for multi-millionaires or even billionaires who can wipe their butts with $100 bills and brag about their equipment. I don't normally approve of people complaining about cost with a sour grapes attitude, but I don't care how much you sugar coat it in these reviews this stuff is just pretentious vanity bullshit.
Yep. I 100% agree. $375,000 a pair is ridiculous and obscene. Even if I was a billionaire, I would not consider wasting my money on a scam. A fool and his money are....
You mentioned a Wilson Audio Watt Buddy as competition for these. I also read why your reviews are just subjective. Now, GR research just did a video on the Wilson where they identified horrible edge diffraction due to the design--completely destroying high frequency reponse. They fixed it with a form placed around the tweeter. Why have no subjective reviews identified this easily measured abnormalitie? Is it not audible? Could you not hear this? Are reviewers blinded by the cost and reputation of Wilson. Or is it like Toole identified, "reviewers" are behind people off the street and salesmen in ability to identify good speakers?
We use a process of objective observational reviewing. Subjective reviewing would tell you how we feel about a product, and we leave that to you. We think your central question may be "why did observation not reveal edge diffraction?". To be logical, one must ask "what would the observable sonic element of edge diffraction be?". Because one cannot see edge diffraction and it isn't an audible phenomenon per se; rather, it has an audible effect. In our review of the Wilson Sasha V (we are working on the Watt/Puppy now) we noted that it seems to have a restriction in image height. We also noted deviations in frequency response from flat. Could those be due to edge diffraction? We don't really care because we think you don't really care. So we try not to speculate too much especially since many phenomena are the result of multiple technical causes and the mind seems to prefer simple (often erroneous) explanations. We measure many many speakers and they all have measurable problems, so we think the important element is to observe sonically, as best we can, what the main results are using music as test signals. (Also, to be clear, the Watt/Puppy was not intended as an example of competition for the M7, it is an example of a well-regarded speaker in the price range several clicks down from the M7. We used it here an an example of what one gives up below the exalted price of the M7. There are many universal assertions that there is nothing to be gained going from a $37k speaker to a $375k speaker, but it is easy to hear what you get. A given person might not want it as much as another, and almost none of us want to pay for it, but that is different from their being no perceivable benefit.) Hope that helps.
Tom: This is perhaps your most revealing speaker review. I would absolutely want to listen to your words again (maybe twice) BEFORE auditioning the M7's. Your comparisons of different speaker designs (electrostatic, box, ribbon, etc.) is revealing as well. Can Alon Wolf walk on water? I kinda get that impression.
Actually, if Alon has a secret, it is that he and his team are pretty resolutely focused on designing speakers with low distortion as perceived at the ear/brain, boring though that may sound. Then he would add "it helps to have large budget for the resulting product so that you can consider all sorts of engineering solutions." There are others who do the science part, so maybe the walk on water accolade should be reserved for those who do so much at lower price points.
I think this is an outstanding review and a lot of work went in it. Maybe it would've been helpful to listen to these speakers in a neutral environment as I know this speaker has issues in finding the right components to work with it and maybe this should've been a focus.. Believability was focused on toward the end of the video I guess most speakers don't offer believability. Believability may be easier to achieve if you don't know what you're missing. So the argument goes never ever listen to these speakers. Remove yourself from the garden of Eden immediately refuse to go into the room where the speakers may be. Never ever Open Pandora's box. Remember the Nazis when they opened up the box near the end of raiders of the lost Ark. It was a mistake. I have a Bowers 802d3 for some reason you're written review couldn't listen to them because they weren't available which was really odd that was about eight years ago.
@@iampuzzleman282 Review inventory of certain models is oddly thin at certain times. We did just get the 804d4 in last week. But with 5000 models of speakers on the market we’ll never come close to doing them all.
You are paying for diminishing returns over something like a KEF Blade Meta or B&W 801 D4, and I can easily build an world class audio system for $350,000.
Only people with extreme incomes can afford speakers like this. And to each their own. I would.prefer an approxi- mately $7500 to $10,000 speaker mated with 2 $3500 to $5000 subs and I dont think Id be far off any $50k and up all in one setup. Am just as happy with a $35-40k total system. And thats been a life long process to acheive.
Or you could save. If you have an average american income - lets say $150 000/year - and you need say $30 000/year to pay for what you need to stay alive you could easy save appr $1 000 000 in 10 years. With $1 000 000 you could easy buy a good high end system. Not a ”top notch” system, but a good system.
@@brahand what a waste of money that would be.. say a Million dollar for a hifi system ??!!!!!. then be prepared to lose say 75% of YOUR HARD EARNED MONEY in a year to two when you sell... i'm totally with rickjames in regards of spending 40K on a system.. you get an entire AWESOME one for about 50K .
@@brahand AVERAGE American income is $150K/year? Wow I need to go there! Oh wait, I'm retired after working 37 years in tech. Yes I made great income, but the average American earns far less. Don't always believe US government figures. As the saying goes, "There are lies, damned likes and then there's statistics."
Just purchased an active ATC SCM 100 active and above- 95% of the sound quality of a Magico. Auditioned Magico A3 and they were not impressive at all by comparison with an ATC SCM 50
I may sound like a socialst, but I think audio products in this price range are a bit distasteful because they are a reflection of the extreme economic inequality in today´s world.
What a load of BS. These speakers are also powered by an array of electronics worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, well designed horn speakers have a dynamism akin to live music, can be powered by affordable electronics and enjoyed by people who do not light cigars with 100 dollar bills
Tom, I'm a knowledgeable music lover and an audiophile, my system is worth $91,000 and I have never liked magico I find them very cold and clinical and analytical sounding not musical and warm like instruments and voice are in real life so if that's the kind of sound you like so be it I prefer a more natural real-life sound which the magicos are not even close to being.
@@chrisrichards2827 Well, to be clear it isn’t about what I like. It is about how instruments and ensembles sound vis a vis the real thing. Now, there are three comments to add. One is that different listeners have different sensitivities to errors, so it is certainly possible that some element of the M7 voicing is balanced slightly away from your preference. It is possibly hard for me or another reviewer to categorize that as a notable error (there are many of these with speakers) but you still might prefer another speaker to the M7. Second, your musical tastes may have you focusing on particular eras of recordings when standards were different and the Magico voicing may not work as well there as with some other products. Third, my experience is that Magico voicing has changed a lot in the last 10 years (I don’t know exactly when or if it was gradual), and my sense is that the newer models are more in line with your interests. But from talking to many listeners I think your believability profile is quite common and isn’t exactly what Magico is trying to offer. I’m trying to work on how to explain these differences, so thanks for the reminder of how important this is. I mention it just about every time, and test drove covering it with the MBL and Tidal comparisons, but if I went over all the conditions and methodology each time there wouldn’t be a review!
@TASmagazine well my music is all 24/96 upsampled so it's better than the standard 16/44 and my transport is probably the best on the market, Esoteric and all my cabling is rectangular OCC single crystal which is by far way better than anything OFC, and I've had sales people from high end stores come over and listen to my system and they said it would beat systems in the $200,000 range. my ears are better than most audiophile listers, I have been gifted musically since I was a child and I'm lucky I can do things that most people kept like I can go into one store and listen to a system and then go into another store and listen to that system and compare the two in my head I don't know too many people that can do that.
Believability? In what? That the sound you’re hearing is what the engineer heard when he mixed 30 tracks recorded in different rooms at different times? The absolute sound is a worthy standard, but a vanishingly low percentage of music is recorded live in a room in one take. So why try to create believability in what almost never exists among available recordings? If we abandon this misplaced goal, any speaker pair under $50k will do just fine. Which? Select the subset you can afford, listen to them, and if you like the sound, buy them. Selling the mythology of the perfect or the real when so much source material is assemblages of composite parts that don’t exist in the real world is misguided.
In our experience many recordings, and recording engineers, try hard to create a soundstage and soundspace and tonality that is reflective of a believable performance - a performance lacking major distracting distortions that make you aware it isn't real and consistent with the artist's intent. Engineers have very sophisticated tools to work on this. You can ignore this and just buy a stereo that you like -- this will be a good move for some people. You can, alternatively, decide what parts of believability you do and don't care about or care more or less about or your budget can or can't support (at least right now, since there is technological progress that almost always lowers the cost of any given performance level). That's part of why we provide observational detail in our reviews. Lacking a reference, there is no standard we have found that seems meaningful and useful. See our methodology FAQ in the Audiopedia section of The Absolute Sound website. Hope that helps.
@ Yes, of course, some engineers try to replicate a believable performance. But some mixed for optimal radio play. And some, in the early days of stereo did hard left/right panning to accentuate the effect with no regard for realism. Some wanted a composed soundstage but the artist used synthesizers and guitars with heavy effects and compressed vocals. And so while the soundstage might have approximated a live performance, the source sounds were largely synthetic and not found in nature in any “absolute” sense. Some, like Steely Dan used the best solos and rhythm tracks and compiled them at a later date. Indeed, the appropriate goal for a hifi enthusiast should be the search for the Relative Sound. Did the engineer and artist and producer get the sound they wanted RELATIVE to what they were trying to create? If that’s live in a room, great. And if one’s setup can capture that intent across a wide variety of material, it’s a success. That’s because our menu of recordings available is extremely diverse, and a good system must handle it. If my rig can only recreate Miles Davis in a room with 3 others and some microphones, or a symphony in an acoustically great hall, but can’t give me Good Vibrations, or Bostons First Album, or Abbey Road or Yes, or Metallica, or primative Robert Johnson recordings as intended, then it’s an Absolutely Limited system, tuned to parameters with a very small available use-case. I realize this invalidates the entire premise of your approach, but there it is.
@ Your desires are part of the reason for our methodology: describe via observation how components distort the sound. Listeners are then welcome to mix the meal of distortions needed to work with the kinds of recordings they listen to. If this set of recordings follows a particular era of recording or style of mixing and mastering this may be effective. If you listen to a variety of styles, eras, labels and engineering, it will be harder to correct the variety of errors on hand and our experience is that equipment that has lower distortion works better on average. But any given listener’s mileage will vary. The variety of recording errors you have highlighted is why one of our 6 big issues facing audio is “recording standards”. And yet we are surprised how many recordings are very good. We’d like to see more credit given to production teams.
@ I’m sorry, that response is essentially incomprehensible. Things that are inherently true can be stated simply. For my part, I’ll try again. There is no absolute sound. An analogy using televisions may help. Modern OLED TVs reproduce humans and nature beautifully. They also reproduce CGI and animation beautifully. The latter do not exist in nature, much like the sounds on many recordings. The worthiness of the device does not relate to the “absolute” nature of that being reproduced, it relates to the ability of the device to produce the image or sound for what it is, as it was intended by the creator to be. Therefore your reference standard is irrelevant given the variety of music types and recording techniques through history, and more than ever today with AI, pitch correction, auto tune and the like. I do understand that makers of high end equipment want a high end (digital) magazine to speak highly of their products. And I do understand the advertising dollars of these companies is literally your life’s blood. But let’s try to be a bit more down to earth and honest about what these devices can and can’t do. Dazzling prose and loquacious speech tend to obfuscate, not illuminate the point being made. (Perhaps intentionally?) And comparisons to an absolute sound that doesn’t exist may dazzle someone into buying a $350k speaker, but that’s about the only “benefit” to such an approach. Most of us realize that above $25k for any component or speaker, incremental returns essentially fall to zero. So we buy what sounds good to us for the majority material we listen to. As we “absolutely” should.
"The worthiness of the device does not relate to the “absolute” nature of that being reproduced, it relates to the ability of the device to produce the image or sound for what it is, as it was intended by the creator to be." Well said. The absolute sound in our case simply defines test signals that we have found useful in characterizing audio equipment distortions. These are known musical sounds because we can't use unknown sounds as test inputs. And music is used largely because it invokes ~the full ear/brain system and triggers the resulting audible phenomena that are central to "produce the sound" and of necessity perceive the sound. There is no presumption that such specific signals must be used by the consumer in his or her listening, so if that is the point we seemed to be aiming for with the term the absolute sound, we'll endeavor to correct that confusion (thanks). Now to expand on this, we observe that very often the distortions revealed by a broadly challenging set of signals will apply to music that isn't part of the test suite. This makes the approach potentially useful (because it wouldn't be useful if consumers had to use specific music). And there is an observation that lower distortion of many types helps to get closer to a satisfying result (i.e. produce the sound for what the creators intended it to be -- as far as we can know). This makes the approach meaningful, for some. Now, we allow that there could be listeners for whom lower distortion is irrelevant or for whom lower distortion of certain types is not important. They can cherry pick our comments or ignore them. And we allow that listeners to music that is not well recorded may want to ignore this model or may want to cherry pick it if they think it possible to define compensating distortions (e.g. for the 1950s and 1960s standards for bass roll off). You can of course just buy what sounds good to you. Everyone should buy what sounds good to them, we'd say. Many of us tried doing that without any framework for how to proceed and found it to be too much of a random walk, but you and others may be better at the process. And probably no one should buy something expensive that they can barely afford. Fortunately, our experience with people who can easily afford $375k for speakers is that they are pretty financially savvy and not easily dazzled. The rest of us will do well with $1k or $25k or $100k systems as fits our budgets and our sensitivities.
"Quasi rational" is putting it mildly. The idea these speakers legitimately add $340,000 worth of sound value over the KEF Blade One META is likely irrational. I say this, having not heard the M7's but punching anywhere near that much above KEF's flagship in 2024 seems a dubious task from an audio engineering perspective.
We have requested the Blades for review. Denominating the value of performance gains, if any, is in the wallet of the beholder. But one can always hope that the Blades are outstanding.
Like cars, the last 0.1 second quicker acceleration can cost a lot more, but they are obviously not multiple times as quick, but if you are into it, i mean yeah obviously why not, I think it's about your sensory requirements really
@@TASmagazine I think this market of speakers exists to extract money from those with more money than sense, but maybe it's my "experienced" ears that can't hear this special thing companies like Wilson and Magico are creating.
@@kenhiett5266I think you may be saying that because you cannot afford them and may have a different outlook if you actually could and owned such speakers.
@ something's not right with this equation. It's a well prepared review but there's always some monetary incentive and in this case from magico indirectly.
@ We do the videos so that clients (generally not the subject company) can sponsor them. This one didn’t have a sponsor, but it helps build the audience for future videos. So, thanks for watching.
These speakers cost $375,000. And a Porsche 911 GT3 RS costs $375,000. For the same price, I would buy the Porsche. There is no comparison to the intense thrill of a flagship Porsche and a speaker! 🤔 And the Porsche will appreciate in value, while the speakers will depreciate! This is an easy decision.
@TASmagazine It's amusing to dream large, but in my final decisions I usually return to being a modest hick from the sticks. If I were to buy a Porsche, it would be a 718 GTS because it's 9/10ths of the performance at half the price. And Magnepans are like that too. Also my ears detest the sound of boxes so much that I've developed a phobia of box speakers. Transparency is my goal. 😊
@TASmagazine I enjoy your way with words. I wonder if your writing flows easily for you, or if you rethink and juggle the various possible combinations of words. I'm a juggler and I wish it flowed easily. I often think about Mrs. Buehrer, who was my 9th grade english teacher. It felt like she was picking on me because she relentlessly corrected everything I wrote! But she was a great teacher, and I would love to tell her how much I appreciate her! If you have the time, it would be nice to know how you learned to write so well. Maybe you had someone like my Mrs. Buehrer. 😊
Cheaper to just go to live concerts. i dont have much money. I am still using same system I brought in the 70s.. Now things have changing HI HI. It only for the wealthy these days. You are not a young man sir like me. Your hearing would not be as good as a young person. My grandkids can hear much better then me. So now can you evaluate these speakers.
It's not. What matters is connecting more emotionally with the music and liking the appearance of the equipment. Measurements do not matter; you can't measure soundstage.
You cant be serious. Bang & Olufssen can not produce high end audio. They are very good at producing high end design, but that is not the same as high end audio.
Great review...$375K for anything in Audio is ridiculous, and I have a pricey system. I can buy a ferrari for the cost of these speakers. I can't imagine the profit Alon makes on these considering the R&D and materials are nowhere NEAR what it would take to create Ferrari. Ridiculous
The markup on audio electronics is significant. Usually retailers pay about 60% of the MSRP, so the profit margin to the manufacturer is not as great as you think. Auto retailers usually pay the manufacturer at least 90% of the MSRP. Also, a Ferrari is manufactured in much higher quantities, so there is economy of scale using robotics, etc.
I did hear this M7 a while ago together with the Vendersteen Model 7. While the M7 was a good speaker it could not in a million year compete with the Model 7 from Vandersteen. This Vandersteen Model 7 is most likely THE best speaker in the world right now (Jan 2025).
Another brilliantly detailed review. Again, I feel as though I have listened to theses speakers after watching. Thanks Tom!
Thanks for the great review. I have been a subscriber of the Absolute Sound magazine for around a decade and my Dad before he passed was a subscriber since the mid seventies. I used to read his magazines as well. Thanks for all that you do.
These reviews are very solid and show respect for the intelligence of the audience.
Over the past 30 years or so, I tried horn, electrostatic and ribbon speakers. In the end, I went right back to conventional, cone-in-a-box speakers, and for the same reasons described here in the review. Great review.
@@kenmcglown6642 Guess I should have stated up, I'm not an average American worker. As of now I'm 73.years old and retired from that rat race. Was a plain old factory worker 95%.of my working life. Never bothered me a bit that I never madethose kind of wages. The most that I ever made was about $40k a year. And pretty much had to live in a large city to make that kind of money. He'll in the smaller town I'm from factories still fuss and fight over having to pay people more than %15-20 an hour and that's after you've been there 7-8 years. But still never cared to have to be any thing more than a working stiff. I always made enough to live on and through time gradually build up my system to about a $40k 2channel system and about a $14k home theater system. Both of which I get tremendous enjoyment out of. But like I said I would never spend a million dollars on a system
Big time law of diminishing returns. Have a good day!
First and foremost, Tom, I really appreciate your attempts at vivid articulation in your reviews. They are usually most informative and you've really developed a knack at making them interesting for informed audiophiles. In the case of this review (immediately following your discussion of "vivid"), you begin describing sound qualities that are so dependent upon listening rooms, equipment set-up, and recordings being played back, it is hard to delineate how much of your superlatives actually relate to the speakers themselves. No doubt these are very fine speakers and I'm not attempting to impugn in any manner. I'm really just saying that 1) at the high-end, systems become more and more dependent upon the recordings they are playing back, associated equipment and the rooms they are playing in and 2) one would really have to be able to calibrate with your own listening room and familiar recordings in order to assign superlatives to the speakers themselves.
Please keep up the good work! I enjoy your reviews!
These are all issues, certainly. "The problem of recording standards" is one of our 6 major issues facing audio. That said, the number of good recordings is impressively large. The associated equipment helps with the results for sure, but my experience is that particular equipment is less critical to the results I describe than the basic quality level of the supporting gear. I'm working on a project in this area, but so far I'm finding streamers that are at a level of goodness where I could live with most of them, and DACs that are in the same boat, and amps that are like this, etc. Sure, I might prefer one over another (and you might prefer a different one), but "electronic signal purity" has evolved to a point where, at the high end, different good products aren't make or break as far as believability goes. The same is not true of speakers or rooms. I think room treatment and room correction are one of the final audio frontiers, though that is partially due to reservations audio listeners seem to have about room treatment, coupled with the need for professional design service (people seem to dislike paying for services). For a speaker like the M7, I cover it under the assumption that the user will have a well-treated room. Under that assumption, I think what I've reported will hold up pretty well across rooms. My room and Magico's room are different in treatment, but they sound quite similar in many ways because the basic principles being applied are the same and aimed at similar calibration. Hope that helps.
I'd also like to add: good results in at least one situation means that something must be right; bad results in one situation might mean circumstances might need to change before judgement can be made.
Good Review Tom!
I especially appreciated the comparison/benefits from the speakers in the $25-$100K/$100-$25K and what you DO get from investing in the M7 price range.
I personally prefer Rockport Technologies. But my budget has always been $10k-$30k. And I have always got magnificent results.
I do too (I don't have Rockports but I have heard them) Rockports seem to me more dynamic without the slightest glare and I MUCH prefer the engineering in their construction compared to IMHO the ludicrous use of literally HUNDREDS of fasteners in the Magico models which goes so completely against the KISS principle of design.
Rockport does not aluminium for their enclosures which in my estimation requires a whole LOT of careful use of VERY effective damping materials to eliminate the inherent ringing associated with aluminium speakers. That and I feel that Magico overprices their gear due to their badge recognition. Just saying :-) Happy listening !
Tom, your review eloquence is very satisfying and useful, Thank you
Masterclass review.
Thank you sir.
Tom, how great to get to review these…
Thanks for this review which really was refreshing because it was based on real knowledge and understanding of how to design a loudspeaker and what is important.
Will follow...
Alon Wolf is probably THE best of the five best loudspeaker designers worth listening to.
This was another terrific review. I really like the general approach of these reviews, which is “ why this product?” What’s special about this product that makes it worthy of extended discussion?
Not just another piece of gear review .
This is one thing I always liked about Robert E Greene’s reviews in TAS.
He always made it clear at the outfit why he had selected that particular speaker or piece of gear to discuss. What specific unique or informative feature made that piece of gear somehow important.
And I think Tom is doing an excellent job articulating the rationale behind all the design choices, as well as the Sonic results.
REG is a gem. Keep him in your heart or prayers -- his house burned completely to the ground in the LA fires. He and his family (and his violins!) are safe, but he has a tough road ahead.
@ That’s disheartening to hear! My best wishes for REG.
The construction seems to have a lot in common with large Rockport Technologies speakers.
Mmmm . . . this was highly interesting! Magico DOES push the state of the art but for a cost. I HAVE heard the M7's and they ARE lovely. I have also heard Dynaudio's Confidence 50 speakers at ONE SEVENTH the cost of the M7's . The 50's do NOT go QUITE as "low" as the M7's - but I would literally have to have the two speakers side by side to be able to suss the extremely subtle differences they MAY have in terms of a quality experience - let's face it: when it comes to the ABSOLUTE SOUND we really ARE ALL chasing our tails to a certain extent because no matter HOW much we spend on recreating music in our homes we will ALWAYS hear the difference between that and a live performance 🙂
It would be interesting to hear you compare it to the Wilson XVX
TM may visit RH to hear the XVX under similarly good conditions. He has a lot on his plate, though.
In a really very informal "survey" I made showing the XVX speaker to girl friends and wives of audio hobby friends not ONE would want an XVX speaker anywhere NEAR their home LOL
That plus if you tune into Danny's TH-cam's at GR Research you might come away rethinking Wilson's approach to design and sound . . . just saying :-)
this is so interesting and weird at the same time.
i'm reading the comments below, and noticed that most of the guys don't mention the price as they're are totally OK with that !!!. a pair of these cost 375.000.00 Dollars !. not 350 bucks... are they embarrassed to say anything ?. but rather they pretended to act cool . oh sure that's some chump change . money no object 😁🙄... i wonder how many here can afford to buy a pair of these speakers ?!?!?!? .
are they worth the money?. absolutely not.. they sure are GREAT Speakers. however, WE ALL KNOW that the mark--up on audio equipment is HUGE. and the losses you take when you sell them is HUGE as well. i bet the value of these in the used market in a couple of years will be worth Half of their cost.. anyways. THANK YOU Tom for the review .
You have NO idea to what degree I so AGREE with you! Even FIFTY thousand dollars is humongous money compared to the Magicos here in question at $350 K USD and even though I don't have a pair of Dynaudio Confidence 50 speakers priced at 50 thousand CAD I've heard them and to me, they easily compare to these M7's at SEVEN TIMES the price. Not only that I really wonder at the use of aluminium in certain of Magico's models and in some of their models they use literally HUNDREDS of metal fasteners. !!! This is engineering gone amuck if you ask me :-) Anyway as you say this IS interesting and weird at the same time - it seems that society has become inured to simply irrational parameters of what constitutes "value" and the relative cost of for example a pair of speakers to a HOUSE! I mean in certain areas of the USA and Canada one can buy a pretty nice house for 350 thousand dollars not counting tax. Oh well . . . I give up LOL To be devil's advocate for a moment, firms like Magico DO push the boundaries of what's possible in sound recreation but then again so too does a firm in France (Diptyque) that creates state of the art Magnepan beating speakers for a FRACTION of Magico's prices. Go figure :-) Let's have fun listening to OUR "reasonable" gear right? LOL
"... bass roll-off of planars"
Planars are fine, it's the dipole implementation that elicits the challenge!
Wondering if there is an online shop to buy that CIS Model 6 power conditioner?
A really excellent review. You say that it was a long one--I say I don't see what part(s) could have been done without.
We really appreciate that. Thanks.
Apparently the listening test was done at the Magico facility in Northern California, instead of Tom's listening room. I say interesting, because Tom normally uses an Audio Research Reference 6SE tube preamp, while the Magico listening room is all solid state using a Solution 727 Preamplifier priced at $78K. I wonder what Tom would say about the sound of the M7 using the Audio Research tub pre-amp.
For clarity, I also use the MBL N51 (solid-state) in listening room 2. And DACs direct to amplifiers. My major consistent finding in comparing tube and solid-state front ends is in imaging. There can be tonal balance differences, but the ARC seems not to be designed for that (although it has higher output impedance than most SS designs so if you use the ‘wrong’ cables you could create a low pass filter). Then logically, not observationally, there is the 10,000:1 difference in magnitude between speaker and electronic distortions. That ‘should’ mean that the M7s would do what they do with many good front ends. As a sort of accidental test of this, we played tape and it was tape-like but digital showed what the speakers can do just as well. Same result with red book and high res digital. I would worry more that the Magico room is part of the result, but listening room 2 is calibrated to similar standards. I hope I was clear that a speaker like this needs to be in a well-treated room to do its thing.
@ Not sure I would equate digital with solid state, and analog (tape) with tubes, unless the tape system had tube electronics.
No indeed. Only pointing out that sources with different characters didn’t alter the fundamental nature of things that I enumerated as basics of this speaker system. But when we switched speakers to a S model, the change was significant. This only suggests the secret of much of the sound via the M7 isn’t this particular electronics stack. But if you want to know how the M7 sounds with a specific tube preamp, I don’t know. The tape system did use a tube preamp, fwiw.
The Magico Q7 V2 was 2015 and was supposedly the best sounding speaking in the world - now can't even sell for 30%.
I looked for a review about sonus faber il cremonese on absolute sound. And when I saw something it basically was a press release issued by sonus. Did you ever review this speaker and I know it goes back a number of years?
We did not review it.
Tom please consider a video expanding the "believability" factor and the associated recommended equipment. Perhaps these would be indicators for what to hope to achieve for us from a more experienced listener. Thank you.
Good idea. It isn't complicated, so here is the short version. We use the sound of real instruments in real space (the absolute sound) as a reference for evaluating equipment (we aren't tell ing you what we like, we are telling you what things sound like). This reference is used because over the decades we have found that getting closer to this reference gives better musical satisfaction. For a long time, we referred to the objective of audio at home as being "accurate reproduction". But we can't exactly know this, because we don't know the exact placement of performers or the exact settings of their amps or the exact instruments they play etc. But knowing the sound of real instruments in real space, we can pretty well judge when stereo delivers a 'believable' version of real instruments in real space. 'Believable' then just means the sound has no obvious distracting distortions that tell you it is being reproduced badly. The equipment sounds like it's sound might be real or accurate (and, again, we can't know accuracy exactly). This is a model for a system (stereo at home) that aims at identifying ~large distortions. Of which there are many. For more, see our Methodology paper in the Audiopedia section of The Absolute Sound website.
>i never heard the description 'lack of colouration' i suppose can be part of voicing but not entirely - thanks 4this M7 review.
@@keithgregson9573 Hope it was clear that ‘lack of coloration’ indicates minimal distortion of the incoming signal. It suggests a voicing with low deviation from the absolute sound (musical test signals that function as knowable references for judging distortion). It is hard to write about what is not there (though we did it for the M7). So, voicing descriptions generally cover the deviations chosen by the designers and their magnitude. The possibly unfortunate element of this is the unintended implication that deviations are desirable. You may want them, but many listeners do not.
What are on top of the subwoofers?. Those are wall treatment panels that happen to be the same size of the sub?
The perforated black panels are the vents on the top of the amplifiers, if that is what you're looking at. No subs were used in this system, although Magico keeps subs (in the corners) for other demonstrations.
I think you are right. It looks like binary amplitude diffuser panels sitting on to of the Pilium Hercules monoblocks
Interesting to hear about like a super car is.
I wonder how something like Vivid audio would compare with less money spend in the cabinet but with a different approach.
Anyway am 100% in the horn camp now but think about buying a wide dispersion speakers (magico, Vivid) as a second pair from time to time.
Like that youbgave us options. That was perfect as i am looking to upgrade to a great speaker and one that will be my final upgradeiititts
Glad it was useful. Just remember that Tom hasn't heard all the options under usable conditions.
Tom I sure enjoyed your well done video and your thorough explanations.
I don’t see myself popping 300 K for the speakers or a Lamborghini for that matter as the real cost would be from the divorce court.
Thanks keep up the good work
Yeah, skipping the divorce seems like a smart move.
Well Done!
People complain about the price, but understand that there are 30,000 people in the world who have investable assets of at least $100 million, and 625,000 people with assets of least $30 million worldwide, so that the price of these speakers (and associated equipment) is no big deal to these wealthy people. No one is suggesting the average person go out and buy these speakers.
And Tom Cruise has Magico speakers apparently
How would you describe the M7 in comparison to the M9?
Tom hasn't heard the M9. In basic sonic flavoring, or lack of it, Alon says they are similar. Certainly in the S series, the S2, S3 and S5 are obviously related allowing a choice based on room size, preferred output levels and bottom octave capability. The M9 has some bass control features that seem valuable. He also says that moving from something like the M7 to the M9, if you don't have calibrated listening room acoustics, might be the wrong allocation of funds. Of course one can have both with the right budget. Good luck!
@TASmagazine Awesome thanks!
Speaking of "vivid" and "value" you should review the Vivid Audio Moya. ;-)
oh, you. how relatable! i will keep this in mind the next time i have $375k for speakers. thats what i love about you, always giving valuable insight that the "everyman" can appreciate. the overwrought and flowery descriptions really sell me on it.
How many speakers of this model are sold in a year? What causes this thing to be so expensive from material standpoint not R&D.
@@iampuzzleman282 No idea how many will be sold. 20 pairs per year would be a sizable business in high-end audio terms. We also don’t know the BOM. But again, you get to a typical high end BOM pretty quickly with multiple components costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, plus CNCing 400 lb billets for multiple panels, plus custom CF cabinets, plus custom drivers. Then as you say you have R&D, and also overhead (space and leasing for CNC machines, the listening room, warehouse, test rooms, finish space, offices, sales people, marketing people, service people). And the cost of the dealer network.
@ this is an impressive answer and appreciated
>stunning engineering - his M9 has in-house designed active crossover symmetry - 'Passionate Engineering'
I did hear this M7 a while ago together with the Vendersteen Model 7. While the M7 was a good speaker it could not in a million year compete with the Model 7 from Vandersteen.
This Vandersteen Model 7 is most likely THE best speaker in the world right now (Jan 2025).
And IF same loudspeaker compny could compete with Wandersteen it might be Martin, not Magico.
The only advantage Magico have above Martin is that Magico is produced in USA, and Martin is not.
A used pair of Quad ESL-63 speakers can often sound just as good, if not better, than a new pair, especially when considering the price difference.
Tom, Let me correct you. You said in your intro that the M7 will appeal to "knowledgeable music lovers”. I think you meant to say that it will appeal to “wealthy music lovers”. There are plenty of knowledgeable music lovers that would love to own the M7s, but if they aren’t also wealthy, they won’t own them.
Sure. Maybe the first part of this sentence wasn't clear: "And even allowing for price and appropriate budget, the M7 will mainly appeal to knowledgeable music lovers."
I had no idea, $375k for speakers!! I would build a killer man cave house with that money..😁
The Magico M9's are $750K per pair.
For that money I have the Kharma speakers.
Absolutely! Kharma Extreme Exquisite Grand 3.0 is far better than M7…… amazing speaker
For that much money ….id pay off my mortgage 😅
$375K a pair is crazy. Of course it’s a deal compared to their $750K speakers. I think I’ll pass on these and keep my house instead. Speakers for the Elons and Bezos of the world. You aren’t responsible for the pricing. Thanks for the review.
I subscribed to TAS and others back in the '90s, and just recently resubbed to them and Stereophile. Back then there was some equipment that seemed extremely expensive to me and well beyond my means, but I enjoyed reading about it, and many of the other things I actually had a chance to own if I worked it right. But now it has gone beyond ludicrous with things like these speakers. This isn't for audiophiles, it's for multi-millionaires or even billionaires who can wipe their butts with $100 bills and brag about their equipment. I don't normally approve of people complaining about cost with a sour grapes attitude, but I don't care how much you sugar coat it in these reviews this stuff is just pretentious vanity bullshit.
Yep. I 100% agree. $375,000 a pair is ridiculous and obscene. Even if I was a billionaire, I would not consider wasting my money on a scam. A fool and his money are....
Now that's the definition of sour grapes right here folks
@@A-gks
So apparently your comment is the definition of a fool and his money.
You mentioned a Wilson Audio Watt Buddy as competition for these. I also read why your reviews are just subjective. Now, GR research just did a video on the Wilson where they identified horrible edge diffraction due to the design--completely destroying high frequency reponse. They fixed it with a form placed around the tweeter. Why have no subjective reviews identified this easily measured abnormalitie? Is it not audible? Could you not hear this? Are reviewers blinded by the cost and reputation of Wilson. Or is it like Toole identified, "reviewers" are behind people off the street and salesmen in ability to identify good speakers?
We use a process of objective observational reviewing. Subjective reviewing would tell you how we feel about a product, and we leave that to you. We think your central question may be "why did observation not reveal edge diffraction?". To be logical, one must ask "what would the observable sonic element of edge diffraction be?". Because one cannot see edge diffraction and it isn't an audible phenomenon per se; rather, it has an audible effect. In our review of the Wilson Sasha V (we are working on the Watt/Puppy now) we noted that it seems to have a restriction in image height. We also noted deviations in frequency response from flat. Could those be due to edge diffraction? We don't really care because we think you don't really care. So we try not to speculate too much especially since many phenomena are the result of multiple technical causes and the mind seems to prefer simple (often erroneous) explanations. We measure many many speakers and they all have measurable problems, so we think the important element is to observe sonically, as best we can, what the main results are using music as test signals. (Also, to be clear, the Watt/Puppy was not intended as an example of competition for the M7, it is an example of a well-regarded speaker in the price range several clicks down from the M7. We used it here an an example of what one gives up below the exalted price of the M7. There are many universal assertions that there is nothing to be gained going from a $37k speaker to a $375k speaker, but it is easy to hear what you get. A given person might not want it as much as another, and almost none of us want to pay for it, but that is different from their being no perceivable benefit.) Hope that helps.
Superlative magico loudspeakers.
What did you think of focal Stella utopia em Evo?
Andre Jennings gave it a Golden Ear Award in 2024. His coverage is on The Absolute Sound website.
@TASmagazine thanks for replying and opinion.
@TASmagazine how do I go to absolute sound website. Thanks 🙏
@ www dot theabsolutesound dot com
@TASmagazine thanks
I enjoy and value the content but give us a smile once in a while, make it fun?
Working on it. The camera has a sign that says "smile". If intentions were actions, the world might be a better place.
Tom: This is perhaps your most revealing speaker review. I would absolutely want to listen to your words again (maybe twice) BEFORE auditioning the M7's. Your comparisons of different speaker designs (electrostatic, box, ribbon, etc.) is revealing as well. Can Alon Wolf walk on water? I kinda get that impression.
Actually, if Alon has a secret, it is that he and his team are pretty resolutely focused on designing speakers with low distortion as perceived at the ear/brain, boring though that may sound. Then he would add "it helps to have large budget for the resulting product so that you can consider all sorts of engineering solutions." There are others who do the science part, so maybe the walk on water accolade should be reserved for those who do so much at lower price points.
I think this is an outstanding review and a lot of work went in it. Maybe it would've been helpful to listen to these speakers in a neutral environment as I know this speaker has issues in finding the right components to work with it and maybe this should've been a focus.. Believability was focused on toward the end of the video I guess most speakers don't offer believability. Believability may be easier to achieve if you don't know what you're missing. So the argument goes never ever listen to these speakers. Remove yourself from the garden of Eden immediately refuse to go into the room where the speakers may be. Never ever Open Pandora's box. Remember the Nazis when they opened up the box near the end of raiders of the lost Ark. It was a mistake. I have a Bowers 802d3 for some reason you're written review couldn't listen to them because they weren't available which was really odd that was about eight years ago.
@@iampuzzleman282 Review inventory of certain models is oddly thin at certain times. We did just get the 804d4 in last week. But with 5000 models of speakers on the market we’ll never come close to doing them all.
@@TASmagazine thank you for all your speedy replies very helpful and comforting
It's obviously outta my budget by $69,000 😅👍🏼
You are paying for diminishing returns over something like a KEF Blade Meta or B&W 801 D4, and I can easily build an world class audio system for $350,000.
Only people with extreme incomes can afford speakers like this. And to each their own. I would.prefer an approxi- mately $7500 to $10,000 speaker mated with 2 $3500 to $5000 subs and I dont think Id be far off any $50k and up all in one setup. Am just as happy with a $35-40k total system. And thats been a life long process to acheive.
Or you could save.
If you have an average american income - lets say $150 000/year - and you need say $30 000/year to pay for what you need to stay alive you could easy save appr $1 000 000 in 10 years.
With $1 000 000 you could easy buy a good high end system. Not a ”top notch” system, but a good system.
@@brahand what a waste of money that would be.. say a Million dollar for a hifi system ??!!!!!. then be prepared to lose say 75% of YOUR HARD EARNED MONEY in a year to two when you sell... i'm totally with rickjames in regards of spending 40K on a system.. you get an entire AWESOME one for about 50K .
@@bentleygt3716 dont sell it. Listen to it.
@@brahand AVERAGE American income is $150K/year? Wow I need to go there! Oh wait, I'm retired after working 37 years in tech. Yes I made great income, but the average American earns far less. Don't always believe US government figures. As the saying goes, "There are lies, damned likes and then there's statistics."
Just purchased an active ATC SCM 100 active and above- 95% of the sound quality of a Magico. Auditioned Magico A3 and they were not impressive at all by comparison with an ATC SCM 50
Auditioned M2's order 20.7s
Played Monica "So Gone"
Dealer turned song 🎵 off
The 20.7s are very nice.
I may sound like a socialst, but I think audio products in this price range are a bit distasteful because they are a reflection of the extreme economic inequality in today´s world.
What a load of BS. These speakers are also powered by an array of electronics worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, well designed horn speakers have a dynamism akin to live music, can be powered by affordable electronics and enjoyed by people who do not light cigars with 100 dollar bills
Tom, I'm a knowledgeable music lover and an audiophile, my system is worth $91,000 and I have never liked magico I find them very cold and clinical and analytical sounding not musical and warm like instruments and voice are in real life so if that's the kind of sound you like so be it I prefer a more natural real-life sound which the magicos are not even close to being.
@@chrisrichards2827 Well, to be clear it isn’t about what I like. It is about how instruments and ensembles sound vis a vis the real thing. Now, there are three comments to add. One is that different listeners have different sensitivities to errors, so it is certainly possible that some element of the M7 voicing is balanced slightly away from your preference. It is possibly hard for me or another reviewer to categorize that as a notable error (there are many of these with speakers) but you still might prefer another speaker to the M7. Second, your musical tastes may have you focusing on particular eras of recordings when standards were different and the Magico voicing may not work as well there as with some other products. Third, my experience is that Magico voicing has changed a lot in the last 10 years (I don’t know exactly when or if it was gradual), and my sense is that the newer models are more in line with your interests. But from talking to many listeners I think your believability profile is quite common and isn’t exactly what Magico is trying to offer. I’m trying to work on how to explain these differences, so thanks for the reminder of how important this is. I mention it just about every time, and test drove covering it with the MBL and Tidal comparisons, but if I went over all the conditions and methodology each time there wouldn’t be a review!
@TASmagazine well my music is all 24/96 upsampled so it's better than the standard 16/44 and my transport is probably the best on the market, Esoteric and all my cabling is rectangular OCC single crystal which is by far way better than anything OFC, and I've had sales people from high end stores come over and listen to my system and they said it would beat systems in the $200,000 range. my ears are better than most audiophile listers, I have been gifted musically since I was a child and I'm lucky I can do things that most people kept like I can go into one store and listen to a system and then go into another store and listen to that system and compare the two in my head I don't know too many people that can do that.
Believability? In what? That the sound you’re hearing is what the engineer heard when he mixed 30 tracks recorded in different rooms at different times? The absolute sound is a worthy standard, but a vanishingly low percentage of music is recorded live in a room in one take. So why try to create believability in what almost never exists among available recordings? If we abandon this misplaced goal, any speaker pair under $50k will do just fine. Which? Select the subset you can afford, listen to them, and if you like the sound, buy them. Selling the mythology of the perfect or the real when so much source material is assemblages of composite parts that don’t exist in the real world is misguided.
In our experience many recordings, and recording engineers, try hard to create a soundstage and soundspace and tonality that is reflective of a believable performance - a performance lacking major distracting distortions that make you aware it isn't real and consistent with the artist's intent. Engineers have very sophisticated tools to work on this. You can ignore this and just buy a stereo that you like -- this will be a good move for some people. You can, alternatively, decide what parts of believability you do and don't care about or care more or less about or your budget can or can't support (at least right now, since there is technological progress that almost always lowers the cost of any given performance level). That's part of why we provide observational detail in our reviews. Lacking a reference, there is no standard we have found that seems meaningful and useful. See our methodology FAQ in the Audiopedia section of The Absolute Sound website. Hope that helps.
@ Yes, of course, some engineers try to replicate a believable performance. But some mixed for optimal radio play. And some, in the early days of stereo did hard left/right panning to accentuate the effect with no regard for realism. Some wanted a composed soundstage but the artist used synthesizers and guitars with heavy effects and compressed vocals. And so while the soundstage might have approximated a live performance, the source sounds were largely synthetic and not found in nature in any “absolute” sense. Some, like Steely Dan used the best solos and rhythm tracks and compiled them at a later date. Indeed, the appropriate goal for a hifi enthusiast should be the search for the Relative Sound. Did the engineer and artist and producer get the sound they wanted RELATIVE to what they were trying to create? If that’s live in a room, great. And if one’s setup can capture that intent across a wide variety of material, it’s a success. That’s because our menu of recordings available is extremely diverse, and a good system must handle it. If my rig can only recreate Miles Davis in a room with 3 others and some microphones, or a symphony in an acoustically great hall, but can’t give me Good Vibrations, or Bostons First Album, or Abbey Road or Yes, or Metallica, or primative Robert Johnson recordings as intended, then it’s an Absolutely Limited system, tuned to parameters with a very small available use-case. I realize this invalidates the entire premise of your approach, but there it is.
@ Your desires are part of the reason for our methodology: describe via observation how components distort the sound. Listeners are then welcome to mix the meal of distortions needed to work with the kinds of recordings they listen to. If this set of recordings follows a particular era of recording or style of mixing and mastering this may be effective. If you listen to a variety of styles, eras, labels and engineering, it will be harder to correct the variety of errors on hand and our experience is that equipment that has lower distortion works better on average. But any given listener’s mileage will vary. The variety of recording errors you have highlighted is why one of our 6 big issues facing audio is “recording standards”. And yet we are surprised how many recordings are very good. We’d like to see more credit given to production teams.
@ I’m sorry, that response is essentially incomprehensible. Things that are inherently true can be stated simply. For my part, I’ll try again. There is no absolute sound. An analogy using televisions may help. Modern OLED TVs reproduce humans and nature beautifully. They also reproduce CGI and animation beautifully. The latter do not exist in nature, much like the sounds on many recordings. The worthiness of the device does not relate to the “absolute” nature of that being reproduced, it relates to the ability of the device to produce the image or sound for what it is, as it was intended by the creator to be. Therefore your reference standard is irrelevant given the variety of music types and recording techniques through history, and more than ever today with AI, pitch correction, auto tune and the like. I do understand that makers of high end equipment want a high end (digital) magazine to speak highly of their products. And I do understand the advertising dollars of these companies is literally your life’s blood. But let’s try to be a bit more down to earth and honest about what these devices can and can’t do. Dazzling prose and loquacious speech tend to obfuscate, not illuminate the point being made. (Perhaps intentionally?) And comparisons to an absolute sound that doesn’t exist may dazzle someone into buying a $350k speaker, but that’s about the only “benefit” to such an approach. Most of us realize that above $25k for any component or speaker, incremental returns essentially fall to zero. So we buy what sounds good to us for the majority material we listen to. As we “absolutely” should.
"The worthiness of the device does not relate to the “absolute” nature of that being reproduced, it relates to the ability of the device to produce the image or sound for what it is, as it was intended by the creator to be." Well said. The absolute sound in our case simply defines test signals that we have found useful in characterizing audio equipment distortions. These are known musical sounds because we can't use unknown sounds as test inputs. And music is used largely because it invokes ~the full ear/brain system and triggers the resulting audible phenomena that are central to "produce the sound" and of necessity perceive the sound. There is no presumption that such specific signals must be used by the consumer in his or her listening, so if that is the point we seemed to be aiming for with the term the absolute sound, we'll endeavor to correct that confusion (thanks). Now to expand on this, we observe that very often the distortions revealed by a broadly challenging set of signals will apply to music that isn't part of the test suite. This makes the approach potentially useful (because it wouldn't be useful if consumers had to use specific music). And there is an observation that lower distortion of many types helps to get closer to a satisfying result (i.e. produce the sound for what the creators intended it to be -- as far as we can know). This makes the approach meaningful, for some. Now, we allow that there could be listeners for whom lower distortion is irrelevant or for whom lower distortion of certain types is not important. They can cherry pick our comments or ignore them. And we allow that listeners to music that is not well recorded may want to ignore this model or may want to cherry pick it if they think it possible to define compensating distortions (e.g. for the 1950s and 1960s standards for bass roll off). You can of course just buy what sounds good to you. Everyone should buy what sounds good to them, we'd say. Many of us tried doing that without any framework for how to proceed and found it to be too much of a random walk, but you and others may be better at the process. And probably no one should buy something expensive that they can barely afford. Fortunately, our experience with people who can easily afford $375k for speakers is that they are pretty financially savvy and not easily dazzled. The rest of us will do well with $1k or $25k or $100k systems as fits our budgets and our sensitivities.
Again...1st test must be your hearing. If hearing not perfect..."you shall not pass."
Just buy used high end.
My hand truck is only rated for 500 pounds.
"Quasi rational" is putting it mildly. The idea these speakers legitimately add $340,000 worth of sound value over the KEF Blade One META is likely irrational. I say this, having not heard the M7's but punching anywhere near that much above KEF's flagship in 2024 seems a dubious task from an audio engineering perspective.
We have requested the Blades for review. Denominating the value of performance gains, if any, is in the wallet of the beholder. But one can always hope that the Blades are outstanding.
The KEF's probably measure better.
Like cars, the last 0.1 second quicker acceleration can cost a lot more, but they are obviously not multiple times as quick, but if you are into it, i mean yeah obviously why not, I think it's about your sensory requirements really
@@TASmagazine I think this market of speakers exists to extract money from those with more money than sense, but maybe it's my "experienced" ears that can't hear this special thing companies like Wilson and Magico are creating.
@@kenhiett5266I think you may be saying that because you cannot afford them and may have a different outlook if you actually could and owned such speakers.
How much are these guys getting paid for this?
@@iampuzzleman282 $0 from Magico. $50 from TH-cam. For about 40 hours work.
@ something's not right with this equation. It's a well prepared review but there's always some monetary incentive and in this case from magico indirectly.
@ We do the videos so that clients (generally not the subject company) can sponsor them. This one didn’t have a sponsor, but it helps build the audience for future videos. So, thanks for watching.
How much? Then there’s all the other electronics components. I could retire with that money.
These speakers cost $375,000.
And a Porsche 911 GT3 RS costs $375,000. For the same price, I would buy the Porsche. There is no comparison to the intense thrill of a flagship Porsche and a speaker! 🤔
And the Porsche will appreciate in value, while the speakers will depreciate! This is an easy decision.
Then the smart move would seem to be to buy the GT3 RS and use the capital gain to fund speakers?
@TASmagazine It's amusing to dream large, but in my final decisions I usually return to being a modest hick from the sticks. If I were to buy a Porsche, it would be a 718 GTS because it's 9/10ths of the performance at half the price.
And Magnepans are like that too. Also my ears detest the sound of boxes so much that I've developed a phobia of box speakers. Transparency is my goal. 😊
@TASmagazine
I enjoy your way with words.
I wonder if your writing flows easily for you, or if you rethink and juggle the various possible combinations of words. I'm a juggler and I wish it flowed easily.
I often think about Mrs. Buehrer, who was my 9th grade english teacher. It felt like she was picking on me because she relentlessly corrected everything I wrote! But she was a great teacher, and I would love to tell her how much I appreciate her!
If you have the time, it would be nice to know how you learned to write so well. Maybe you had someone like my Mrs. Buehrer. 😊
I don't drive.
@@unclewilbur8976 Mr. Benson. 9th, 10th and 11th grades.
Cheaper to just go to live concerts. i dont have much money. I am still using same system I brought in the 70s.. Now things have changing HI HI. It only for the wealthy these days. You are not a young man sir like me. Your hearing would not be as good as a young person. My grandkids can hear much better then me. So now can you evaluate these speakers.
Rockport is much better than Magico
Well, Beolab 90 go down to 12 Hz (M7 to 18hz) and costs $200k less. Beolab can play up to 126db, M7 to 120dB, if thats important for someone......
It's not. What matters is connecting more emotionally with the music and liking the appearance of the equipment. Measurements do not matter; you can't measure soundstage.
You cant be serious. Bang & Olufssen can not produce high end audio.
They are very good at producing high end design, but that is not the same as high end audio.
375k gtfo
Cut your bloddy costs in half! Life is truly not fair if only privileged rich dudes can afford "hifi"
What kind of audio system do think the richest person on the planet was listening to 100 years ago?
I am waiting for Tesla to make speaker drivers, they should be able to come up with something crazy XD
Great review...$375K for anything in Audio is ridiculous, and I have a pricey system. I can buy a ferrari for the cost of these speakers. I can't imagine the profit Alon makes on these considering the R&D and materials are nowhere NEAR what it would take to create Ferrari. Ridiculous
The markup on audio electronics is significant. Usually retailers pay about 60% of the MSRP, so the profit margin to the manufacturer is not as great as you think. Auto retailers usually pay the manufacturer at least 90% of the MSRP. Also, a Ferrari is manufactured in much higher quantities, so there is economy of scale using robotics, etc.
I did hear this M7 a while ago together with the Vendersteen Model 7. While the M7 was a good speaker it could not in a million year compete with the Model 7 from Vandersteen.
This Vandersteen Model 7 is most likely THE best speaker in the world right now (Jan 2025).
Looks like the Vandersteen Model 7 is now discontinued, replaced by Model Seven XTRM.