Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

JLH wrote:

Foolishness is too soft a word to describe the unspeakable garbage the Magico Ultimate is. They have mis-matched impedance drivers, improperly sized horns for the drivers, and made everything from metal. Then they go on an attempt to brag that "We use the same CAD and simulation software that BMW uses to design their new cars". Who are they kidding? Like this is supposed to provide some kind of "rightness" to their Moronic design. The petty marketing lines they use throughout the entire Web site are laughable. In addition, if I had a welder that took 4 months to make just one of those metal horns, I would fire his ass and hire better help. Us horn lovers have been badly violated by a primitive brain with the Magico Ultimate. No doutb.

I would not call Magico Ultimate as unspeakable garbage as I never heard them. I would call them very ignorantly made loudspeakers by a builder who have very remote understanding of what he does. I would very much agree that US horn lovers have been badly violated by the primitive objectives of Magico and by the Robert Harley’s foolish commentaries.

I will leave aside the “simulation software that BMW uses” as it is too much “for kids”. I would also leave aside the fact that it was spent 4 months to make just one of those upper bass horns. ( Do you want to recall how long you made your upper bass horns) I presume that making those horns is not the guy full time job and therefore he is perfectly within his constitutional right to do it as long and he wish.  Should the people like Robert Harley writhe about 4 months as an evidence of complexity or should he to BS that the only two shops in US can make them? I do not think so, but it what the marketing whores do: ignite a cheap publicity around the faulty facts.

I also do not particularly blame the Magico for use of metal. If the aluminum is thick enough and if those horns are “hairy” finished then it might be fine. Do not forget the Magico use compression drivers where the back chamber (the really shaky part of the horns) is already implemented and therefore they could be less strong and have less mass then the horns that use cone drivers as the compression.

Ro review very briefly here are my issues with Magico design.

1) High order crossovers.  24dB and 48dB. This thing is a direct death for music and very symbolic and indicative that any single person who approaches the Magico is a barbarian in Sound and Music.  With 24dB and 48dB per octave those speakers are only capable to play heavy metal and black rap, which was exactly the music that the Magico guy had in his disposal in Vegas.

2) Time aliment.  Horns operate in phase domain and the times misaligned horns are waste of efforts.  The art of horns arrangement is to make them functional, naturally phase-coherent, user friendly and so on. The Magico guy juts piled up a bunch of the horns all together to make them photogenic and he has no remote comprehending of any further results. The analog crossovers that he provides have no time alignment provision and he believes the providing the digital crossover he helps the satiation. If the Robert Harley is so smart then instead of writing the idiocy in his review he should educate the ignorant Magico guy what kind of resolution he had a the stop-band at 48dB per octave. I am sure that playing the Pacific converter and $20K drivers within an octave slope at 8 bit resolution is a lot of fun but it is only of someone’s sick brain overwrites own ears…

3) 120Hz upperbass horn located in a middle of a room? Great, it is exactly where he lost the 20-25Hz but loosing the floor reinforcement. The decoupled straight upper bass never sound correct not mater what you do. It has too much HF overtones and too low LF harmonics.

4) The contamination of the horns exit by the baffle. This is a huge mistake and it produces very specific and very non-resolvable horrible sound. The exit of HF and MF horn should be clean form any sizable surfaces. Any vertical surfaces create an acoustic fog those bounds back to the listening space diluting everything. The Magico is the worst case of baffle contamination I even seen.

5) The Magico’s bass section is complete joke. I know the Aura drivers very well and to use them as Magico does requite to use a lot of LSD to appreciate THIS bass. Not to mention that to push Aura driver up to 120Hz is like asking 100 people to threw up a space station in order to kick it to an orbit.

I can go on but it is close to 1.30 am and the Magico is not really noble contestent to think about them seriously. Unfortunately, the problem is not with the Magico. Everyone does the things in audio within the scope of own reference points, limitation of own expertise, own sonic deafness and own musical evolvement. The Magico guy was not an exception and what he dos is a perfect depiction of his objectives. The real guilty party in that entire Magico circus is Robert Harley. A reviewing should be a quietly assurance of a product. Unfortunately Robert Harley signed off a very poor speaker.

I am sure Robert is happy, the Magico guy is happy but idea of using ears and brain in order to make horns to sound better got screwed and the Morons out there got the very negative example.

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site