Before I get carried away with pin-point accuracy through mids, ear-level tweeters, and aerospace-grade enclosures, a quick bit of back history: in June 2020, Magico introduced its $750,000 M9 flagship loudspeaker, the highest-performing semi-active loudspeaker in Magico's oeuvre. Cut to May 2023 and I was invited to hear Magico's third-gen. S3, the company's mid-range floor-standing speakers – although that description does ask you to file asking fees of between £56,998 and £66,000 (depending on finish, so around $71,330 or AU$106,860 for starters) under "mid-range" in your brain.
The above information is when I fell in love with what Magico does. Now, I'm back in Central London, to hear a new proposition that's both a lot more expensive than the S3 and a lot cheaper than the M9 (but still comfortably within money-no-object territory).
CEO Alon Wolf affectionately calls the new M7 the "baby reference", explaining that everything he discovered during R&D for the M9 has now been distilled into the Magico M7 – and built upon. In truth, there's nothing baby-like about these behemoths; one might simply call them slightly more accessible.
The Magico M7 is an all-passive four-way, six-driver floor-standing loudspeaker pair that features the latest Magico drive-unit technology, an organically shaped carbon-fiber-and-aluminum enclosure and the latest iteration of Magico's Elliptical Symmetry Crossover.
Advanced tools rarely seen in cabinet design have been deployed here, such as a Klippel Near-Field Scanner and a Polytec Laser Doppler vibrometer – yes, acoustic, mechanical, electromagnetic, and thermal behaviors were all examined in detail. The M7’s enclosure starts with a monocoque carbon-fiber shell conceived using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) modeling. A multiply 6061-T6 aluminum front baffle with constrained-layer damping using aerospace composites is affixed to an aluminum rear baffle, with front-to-back tensioning rods.
When a member of the esteemed audio press asks Alon Wolf about his abundantly clear perfectionist traits, he laughs and says, "You've got to go further – you've got to look outside of what's been done for the past 150 years. Making the enclosure not what you hear is a huge challenge, and you just can't get there with wooden cabinets."
Why do it – why go to all this trouble? "To get to the truth," Wolf answers simply, quietly adding, "Whatever that is! We have to get out of the way of the music – and I'm proud that this is the quietest enclosure we've ever built"
To help us understand this continual quest to lower the noise floor, he talks about his team's extensive research into sourcing, improving, and implementing a new type of foam that doesn't disintegrate, explaining, "Noise is just another word for sound actually, but the magic is below the noise floor".
Obviously, I'll be needing that on a shirt soon, but the magic Wolf found here surprises me because M7 is a four-way configuration within a completely closed-box design – there is no bass reflex port. When you consider that a ported design would have been much (much) easier since this might augment bass frequencies and potentially regulate the immense pressure that builds up within multiple-driver cabinets, it makes the M7 nothing short of an astounding piece of engineering.
The M7 uses the 28mm diamond-coated beryllium-diaphragm tweeter designed for the M9, a unique 5-inch aluminum-honeycomb core midrange driver (sandwiched with outer and inner layers of graphene-infused carbon fiber), dual 9-inch mid/bass drivers and two new 12-inch bass drivers, all of which feature a newly designed basket assembly and Magico's Gen 8 Magico Nano-Tec cones.
The binding posts are custom-made silver, and on the rear of each M7 is a chrome plate with Alon Wolf’s signature – Wolf’s personal endorsement of every M7 that leaves the Magico factory.
Shall we listen? "Let's talk money first", someone within our party suggests. The Magico M7 will set you back around $560k (they're officially priced at £45,000, which is around AU$859,000). But the whole setup we're listening to? "Let's comfortably say £1 million," answers KJ West One's manager, listing the two Dartzeel NHB-468 monoblock amps, Transparent Opus speaker cables, four-separates-strong dcs Vivaldi Apex system, and even a Revox reel-to-reel within the stack.
Across the course of our listening, a pared-back, lesser-heard Prince track from the vaults sticks out in my mind. I always worry about listening to Prince in polite company, where crying isn't appropriate, but the Purple One’s grip on me was especially strong here. You see, the Magico M7 unearths, separates, layers, and showcases vocal textures and nuance with the skilled hand of an empathetic surgeon.
When Prince leans into his upper registers, there is a sublime clarity, definition, and neutrality to the presentation. I ask whether the tweeter's central placement within the M7 is key to this and Wolf answers, "The tweeter should always be ear-level. Actually, 20% of the audio we hear is on-axis, 80% is off-axis; it's how we know where we are…" Perhaps fearing he may have surpassed my knowledge on hearing and equilibrium, he adds, "Everything else in our speaker design can be moved, the tweeter stays there." I have to agree, I too would like it if that tweeter never again strayed far from my ear.
As with the Magico M9 (and let's be honest, the Magico S3 too) this territory is way out of my price range for a set of the best stereo speakers, although Magico tells me that installation is included with your purchase of the M7 (and they weigh 239kg) so I've started saving…
All gentle jokes aside, it is important to remember that the Magico M7 is not out of everyone's price range – far from it in fact. KJ West One in London is a hi-fi dealership, not a gallery, and I am quite sure that people will buy the Magico M7 – especially once they've heard it.
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