I do not know who Tom Martin. He said that he runs The Absolute Sound and he apparently has power to delete my posts from TAS forum. I have finished with TAS forum – they fully indicated the level of the subject handling. Tom Martin however posted a link to his blog post about Magico Ulitmate.

http://www.avguide.com/blog/first-release-listening-horns-magico-ultimate-ii

This apparently is the MKII, the “improved” version. I have read the Tom’s feedback.  As an observation of a relatively inexperienced person it is a reasonable document. I would not be critical about Tom Martin’s observations – it is a privet post and everyone in titled to demonstrate own views. Still, even in Martin’s uninformed listening experiences it might be clearly recognized the design problems of the Magico Ulitmate. Sure, in the comment section the toilet paper of audio reviewing – the estimable Jonathan Valin – was not be able to stay away from trumping up the stupid excitement.

I do not know what fantasies Tom Martin and Robert Harley had but it looks to me  that Magico Ultimate II is very much the same as Magico Ultimate I, the prefix II mean a new round of marketing BS… Here are the pictures of the Ultimate’s installation in Hong Kong demo room. The guy you heard them is rather ignorant and not experienced to hear the sonic problems with Ultimate design but the pictures are there….

http://www.stereo.net.au/forums/showthread.php?t=18843

Romy the Cat wrote:

I do not know what fantasies Tom Martin and Robert Harley had but it looks to me  that Magico Ultimate II is very much the same as Magico Ultimate I, the prefix II mean a new round of marketing BS… Here are the pictures of the Ultimate’s installation in Hong Kong demo room. The guy you heard them is rather ignorant and not experienced to hear the sonic problems with Ultimate design but the pictures are there…. http://www.stereo.net.au/forums/showthread.php?t=18843 Rgs, Romy the Cat

What is the most interesting at the Hong Kong installation linked in my post above that they drive Magico Ultimate with looks like bi-amping of Lamm ML3 and ML1. The ML1 is 80W PP amp that is OK for this foolish Magico bass channel. The ML3 in country is 40W amp that was build to handle greed current on GM70 and to drive the ported Wilsons and alike. Degrading all the rest Magico Ultimate problem I would say that those Hong Kong folks are a bit wrong to employ ML3 over the Magico MF horns.  Sure they use different logic: if you have 400K speakers then you need to use 160K amp… The moronic logic…

BTW, it kind of opines an interning question: how good the Lamm ML3 for the first half watt? I think it shall be fine but I am sure it would be much better it is meant to work in this mode. If ML3 would just a few watts then it would not need to come up with such a powerful 4-tube current provider for second stage. In fact, for first view watts the ML3 shall be 2-stages only.

Again, the Hong Kong folks sell the boxes to people who mostly have absolutely no idea what they do. If the ML3 drives only MF channels of Magico then we are in DSET world and 80% of ML3 is not necessary and ML3 might be converted into $5.000 amplifier on GM70. OK, in the Lamm’s scale it would be $55.000…

Romy the Cat wrote:

I do not know who Tom Martin. He said that he runs The Absolute Sound and he apparently has power to delete my posts from TAS forum. I have finished with TAS forum – they fully indicated the level of the subject handling. Tom Martin however posted a link to his blog post about Magico Ulitmate. http://www.avguide.com/blog/first-release-listening-horns-magico-ultimate-ii This apparently is the MKII, the “improved” version. I have read the Tom’s feedback.  As an observation of a relatively inexperienced person it is a reasonable document. I would not be critical about Tom Martin’s observations – it is a privet post and everyone in titled to demonstrate own views. Still, even in Martin’s uninformed listening experiences it might be clearly recognized the design problems of the Magico Ulitmate. Sure, in the comment section the toilet paper of audio reviewing – the estimable Jonathan Valin – was not be able to stay away from trumping up the stupid excitement.

“As a physicist (PhD) with an M.S in  Acoustics, and a big horns fan, I like to say that I found very little merits in Romy criticism of the Ultimate horns. After spending some time on his website, trying to weed out relevant information to support his dismay (That was hard), I only came up with one coherent point which relates to time alignment. I would like to point out that the benefits  of "time alignment" in multi-way transducers line-up is controversial at best. This is due to the very simple fact that "proper" physical alignment is truly only possible in a concentric devise. One that none of these big horns relates to. Beside, since it looks like the Ultimate is running through a DSP XO, I am sure that a delay can easily be introduced to create a much more accurate time alignment then merely a physical one.  Romy can jump all he likes but the "questionable validity" of vertical physical time alignment has been proven by people with much more appropriate credential then a hobbyist/entertainer.”

I think my commentaries are not necessary.  It is good that the guy is not a doctor or he would insist that there are teeth behind asshole sphincter.

steverino wrote:

Seven or eight years ago when I was still getting TAS, they ran a short article about a rich audiophile in the SF Bay area who had bought a warehouse and fixed it up and installed a prototype full horn system - I mean with a bass horn that was a horn, not a woofer. From the picture they ran it was simply enormous. Does anyone remember that article? The article was the typical puff piece so it was not easy to figure out the technical issues from it. But it was impressive looking. Obviously I got no idea how it really sounded. Never heard anything more about it.

Jonathan Valin wrote:

Third, in Munich, because of the severely limited amount of time available for setup (and the severely limited space to set up in), Wolf DSP’d the U3s for phase but did not DSP them for time alignment.... In Cali, the U3s were painstakingly DSP’d via their digital crossover for linear amplitude, phase, and time (impulse) response.