Yesterday afternoon, I spent two hours at my local Magico dealer listening to Magico 2023 S3 loudspeakers. The supportive equipment included a Luxman C-10X preamplifier, two Luxman M-10X power amplifiers (each in mono mode), a Luxman D-10X digital player and an Aurender N20 streamer/DAC. Interconnects were Transparent Opus (analog); speaker cables were Opus Speaker Cable. Power cords were all Omega and power distribution/conditioning was an Everest 8000. This was a high performance system, indeed!
The first thing I did was to establish the output of the Magico speakers using the Prosonus Studio Reference Disc, which has individual soundtracks producing specific tones from 16Hz to 10,000 Hz. Sitting about 10 feet away from the S3s and exactly between them, I used the Sonic Tools app on my iPhone 14. The overall frequency response of 16 Hz to 16000 Hz displayed had a mean output of 72 db. At 16 Hz, there wasn’t any output whatsoever, but at 32 Hz that tone was reproduced at 65 db. There was one fairly large rise starting at 50 Hz (72 db) reaching 80 db at 100 Hz and then down to 64 db at 500 Hz, then rising up again to 80 db at 1000 Hz and down again to 67 Hz at 4000 Hz, up to 75 db at 8000 Hz and back to 67 db at 10000 Hz. Most of these rises and dips were not particularly irksome except for the one at 1000 Hz, which is at the uppermost range of a trumpet (932 Hz). My suspicion is that most of these anomalies were due to the vast showroom in which the S3s were placed – almost as if they were in the center of a large open field.
The other overriding factor, for me, was the interaction between these Magico speakers and the Luxman amplifiers. To my ears (and I shall blame the amps), sometimes when the music peaked at 100 Hz or 1000 Hz the sound was harsh and a bit outright unpleasant – as if being subjected to noticeable distortion blaring.
Even given all that, I have still concluded that the S3 are fabulous speakers. Their imaging (between the speakers only due to their showroom placement) was extraordinary across the soundstage and to the front and rear, and their ability to reproduce everything in a recording – good and bad – was simply astonishing. The words of background singers were consistently intelligible. Snare drums sounded exactly like snare drums. Human voices were right on, neither mellow sounding nor bright; the voices in choruses were more clearly delineated that I have been accustomed to hearing. Listening to track after track of music I know well was very, very enjoyable.
I have a decent audio system; it is one I can listen to for hours on end without fatigue. For years, I have consistently ended a listening session at a friend’s or being demonstrated in a showroom and never returned home desirous of replacing my speakers or amplifiers with theirs. The Magico 2023 S3s are the first ones (priced under $50,000) for which I can say I prefer those to what I own. I was wow-ed!