HFA Audio Setup History 32 – More speakers – Late 2018-2020

RTFS

After the success of the RTFS Big Blocks, I also reviewed the Ceiling Vane and Carreau. I was hoping that they could replace the GiK 244 panels shown above. Interestingly, while they proved to be much more efficient than the 244’s, this exercise showed me that I was wrong in applying absorption above the speakers and on the ceiling. Rather, if I was to reduce some of the room modes without reducing the liveliness of the room, some damping was needed in other places, and more experiments would soon follow. The Ceiling Vanes would find precisely the right use in the adjacent area where my computer is.

Although I was happy with the Logans, the room did exhibit an annoying flutter echo that I wanted to get rid of. I never heard it with the door-sized Apogees as they were simply blocking this but now it was a problem. Pillows, 244 panels, and other soft damping materials did the trick but also killed the natural room ambiance. What ensued was a review of the RTFS SiRRAH’s. The manufacturer kindly supplied 6 of them for the review and they were tried in more positions than I can recall. But ultimately I found the ideal setting and I retained most of them. The SiRRAHs also provide a measure of damping/absorbing but in addition to a measure of diffusion and they sound less “dead” than competing absorber products.

I tried to create a secondary system based around the Kromas but the space that I had available proved way too small for the big speakers to work well enough. On the right hand, there was no issue but the corner on the left hand side has a strong standing wave that I have not been able to suppress other than by using speakers that don’t excite it in the first place. This is why the Xavian Perla Esclusivos sound so great in this room.

The DaaD that you can see in the corner does very little to tame the room mode but together with RTFS Stripes on the left wall (outside of this picture), it does A LOT to create sonic space on the left side of the soundstage.

First contact with Magico

While I was pondering what to do with my speaker situation, audio buddy Niels had purchased Magico Q5 loudspeakers. They are notoriously difficult to drive but it was nothing his Soulution 711 could not handle. The first time that I heard the speakers in Niels’ system, I was sad to not be able to cheer for his new purchase as I was not impressed, rather the opposite. Coming from my Kromas and Logans and also Niels’ Apogee Full Range dipoles that were previously set up in this room, I felt that the new speakers sounded constrained, cold, and technical, that is, rather non-musical. But sure enough, the more often I heard these speakers, the more they crept under my skin.

Also, with his prior speakers being very different, his system needed some tweaks and cable changes. Fortunately, he had help from mutual friend Werner Ero, who had plenty of earlier Magico experience. Among others, Werner advised the change from the MIT Oracle MA interlink and MIT Shotgun EVO speaker cables to the AudioQuest Fire and Nirvana SX and it has to be said, this made a large difference, adding flow and endowing the speakers with a more organic presentation. Later, Niels also upgraded his Spectral DMC-30SS preamp to a DMC-30SV and that, too, made for a very worthwhile improvement as the bass became firmer and the midrange more tangible and tonally more deeply saturated.

Slowly but surely, I was getting impressed, and simultaneously, I started hearing what my Logans were still not quite getting right. You probably guessed it: bass-foil coherence. But besides that, the Q5’s also had a kind of midrange purity and clarity that even the Logans could not achieve. Worse still, for me that is, the Q5’s possessed this clarity from top to bottom.

At some point, Niels’ system developed into a sort of secondary reference system for many of my review items. One of my favorite tests was something I did for Niels and myself, which is to compare my CH Precision A1.5 to Niels’ Soulution 711.

Incidentally, his 711 had already visited my listening room back when I was still using Apogees and the Wilsons had just come around the corner. At that time, the 711 performed magically well with the Apogee Duettas, even wowing Jan Willem, who was at that time fast becoming a tube fanatic.

As if owning two pairs of very serious speakers was not enough, my experience with Niels’ Q5’s sparked the idea in my head of getting a pair of the most affordable Magicos that existed at that time, the S1’s. Call me crazy, and I probably am indeed, but my logic was that if the Kromas were too heavy to lug around, at least the Magicos would be light enough to move in and out of position as needed. And, sure, they would probably not have much bass to speak of, but I was now a sucker for the Magico purity and I just had to have a slice of it in my own system.

Late 2019 – Getting Magico speakers

When I found a used pair of S1 MkII’s for a good price, I jumped on them and long-time friend Jan Willem was kind enough to once again make an audio trip for me. Due to circumstances, the owner had to sell all of his gear which was sad for him but presented me with this great opportunity. As he had already sold his amplifier (he used a Devialet), I could not listen to the speakers but all looked well and so we packed them in and drove them home.

And so it happened that I had the Magicos and Logans set up side by side. Amazingly, not only did the S1 MkII’s work remarkably well in between the Logans and in my difficult room, but they did not sound clinical at all and they also had unexpectedly powerful bass. Well, relatively, at least. What bass they did reproduce was of very good quality but it just rolled off at some point. For a while, the speakers lived happily side by side and I enjoyed both pairs for their inherent strong areas.

But the more attention I paid to the setup of the Magicos, the better they sounded. The Logans may have been my previous reference in the field of resolution and uncolored transparency, but the Magicos simply matched them in these areas while surpassing them in terms of linearity, coherence, timbre, precision, and focus. Meanwhile, they also proved capable of imaging just as widely as the Logans, and even more deeply. The S1 MkII’s soundstage sure was not as cavernously deep or as 3D as that of the Wilsons but for me, it was plenty.

Of course, the Logans went deeper in the bass, but did they also have more authority? Every time I switched to the Logans after having listened to the Magicos, I had to readjust to the relatively slower and more disjointed bass. Sure, there was much more heft and the 15A’s were the best Logans I had heard but still, there was no hiding the fact that they were a hybrid design with a massive powered subwoofer. With Niels’ ultra-tight and superbly coherent Q5’s in mind, more and more, my little Magicos became the primary choice.

One day, when Werner had visited me and was also surprised at how well the S1’s performed with my system and in my room, he joked that perhaps the Magicos would even outperform the Logans altogether if they were given the free space to breathe.

Magico Only

After both pairs of speakers had been moved out of the way to make room for a pair of review speakers, I decided to reposition only the Magicos, just so I could see how they performed when given free rein over my room, without being flanked by the Logans. Boy, was that ever an ear-opener! Werner may have been joking but he was right, the Magico’s sounded better than the Logans in all aspects, including bass propulsion and solidity and more importantly, the overall bass quality, if understandably still not all of the Logans’ bass heft and depth.

Below 40Hz, the Magicos rolled off quite quickly while the Logans simply kept going and going. But if I was being honest with myself, outside of certain R&B styles and other music with extremely deep bass, the Logans were not really required anymore. So, I sold them and allowed myself to look for a better Magico model. If all that was needed was a little more bass extension, then surely the Magico S3 MkII should be ideal, right? Wrong. I tried a pair and it was a disappointment. Sure, the bass was magnificent, in some ways reminiscent of Niels’ Q5’s. Same for the midrange which was just a tad more open and direct. But otherwise, it was a failure. Most annoyingly, the S3’s treble rolled off significantly earlier than that of the S1’s. This can be heard as well as measured and is even published with the reviews out there. I had already been warned about this but wanted to hear it for myself. In practice, it meant that the only recordings that sounded about right were the ones that I knew were very bright. Second, the S3’s soundstaging was considerably more boxed-in than that of the S1’s. Whereas the little ones were every bit as spacious as the Logans and were truly not sounding like a box-speaker, the S3’s sound very clearly originated from the cabinets. Finally, the S3’s had a mild coloration in the midrange that became more distracting because their upper treble also wasn’t as open as I liked it to be. Knowing that my A1.5 amp drove Niels’ Q5’s absolutely fantastically, I already knew that it couldn’t be an amp to speaker mismatch.

Fortunately, I had been wise enough not to sell the S1’s before getting the S3’s. With no second thoughts, I put the S3’s up for sale and they were gone in no time.

This marked the start of something unusual for an audiophile: a period of being content. Weird, even as I write it, my mind is going in many places but sure enough, for some time, I was happy. Alas, at the start of 2020, my world was about to be rocked when the Broadcast Facility company that I had worked for over 20 years went bankrupt, and all of a sudden, I was unemployed.

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HFA Audio Setups Overview

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