Yes the last system I heard from a "commercial" source was Laurence Dickie's Demo of his original B+W Nautilus at show some years back
BruceD
Yes the last system I heard from a "commercial" source was Laurence Dickie's Demo of his original B+W Nautilus at show some years back
BruceD
It's funny how specs aim to impress, when in fact they sometimes are not really the best. I just saw this:
11-inch mid bass drivers (x2). This entirely new driver incorporates an N48H grade Neodymium ring magnet of unusual size: 120 mm diameter x 8 mm height, plus a second matching magnet on top for complete control of voice coil movement. It is a new benchmark in linearity.
Well, in my magnetically stabilized tonearm, I used the strongest N52 grade...
11-inch mid bass drivers (x2). This entirely new driver incorporates an N48H grade Neodymium ring magnet of unusual size: 120 mm diameter x 8 mm height, plus a second matching magnet on top for complete control of voice coil movement. It is a new benchmark in linearity.
Well, in my magnetically stabilized tonearm, I used the strongest N52 grade...
Yes, lack of adjustability is a problem. Even with just my two-way monitors I would wish for some adjustability, in the tweeter output. Now I have to adjust with levels of toe in, which has its limits and it's own consequences. Fortunately my bass is very adjustable, since its lower regions come from my, obviously volume adjustable, subwoofers, and its higher regions can also be affected by the crossover frequency setting of the subs.
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............or maybe a 3-way orgy with the Estelon in the mix!
I was told M9 consists of two parts that stack on each other. That makes sense since it is almost impossible to move a 1000 lbs 80” tall object. The 700 lbs Q7 has caused some unpleasant incidents in the past during transportation.
My guess is the split is below the binding posts. The upper portion is a complete speaker like an inverted M6, the lower part is just the subwoofer. That’s why the binding posts are so high up in the speaker.
My guess is the split is below the binding posts. The upper portion is a complete speaker like an inverted M6, the lower part is just the subwoofer. That’s why the binding posts are so high up in the speaker.
Mark Seaton
WBF Technical Expert (Speaker & Acoustics)
That's an absolutely massive size neo magnet for an 11" woofer. Such a magnet is scary dangerous to handle once magnetized if it wasn't mounted inside the steel that makes up the woofer's motor. The difference between N48 and N52 isn't very significant, and the H means the chemical make up will have a higher temperature rating before demagnitization vs an N48 rating, and likely more so than N52. Much more common neo magnets for woofers are N35-N42. In a real woofer there is a point when the steel and air gap the coil sits in gets saturated. You can stack 10 magnets and you get no increase in magnetic field. Once the gap is saturated with enough excess that any fluctuations won't shift out of that state, you don't benefit from a bigger magnet.
Those are some massive motors on the 11" and 15", and far from off the shelf. There are a few cool design choices I see here, especially the active-bi-amp, that should make this one serious speaker. To me this feels like a one up of the Rockport Arrakis and big Wilsons. With respect to adjustment capabilities, we don't yet know if the external crossover allows for any tonal or placement-related adjustments.
I find the driver placement choices very interesting. With a cost-no-object design, and now that Alon is placing larger drivers above the midrange driver and the tweeter, he must have considered a full D'Appolito configuration (e.g., Rockport Arrakis, VSA Ultra 11) or at least an M-T-M configuration (e.g., Rockport Lyra, YG Sonja) but affirmatively rejected it. I wonder why?
Maybe splitting up the self-powered woofers, with one up on top, was not an appealing prospect. That would have precluded the inverted complete speaker-on-woofer-module theory which TLi advanced above.
Maybe splitting up the self-powered woofers, with one up on top, was not an appealing prospect. That would have precluded the inverted complete speaker-on-woofer-module theory which TLi advanced above.
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i think when assessing this ultimate Magico design, you have to consider what makes Magico......Magico. elegance, and fitting into a particular vibe trumps other criteria. how to make it the most Magico it can be. not that it won't perform really well.
ponder who chooses to actually buy a particular $750k speaker? someone who has his/her/their interior designer accessorize the room......mostly. not us mouth-breathing mono-brows with open top gear cases sitting around, listening in our underwear.
making a business case for the design, it does connect the dots.
walking into a really high class residence, would you be more impressed with the WAMM or the M9? i think the M9 wins going away. and an M9 sitting in a dealer showroom will be a magnet.
this is eye candy for the whole line-up. and i think good for the hifi industry.
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The crossover’s meticulous design features Linkwitz-Riley filters to deliver 24 dB per octave slopes at the crossover frequency of 120 Hz. Designed in-house from our own platform, the analog crossover is fully balanced with completely discrete circuitry from input to output. Open architecture accommodates additional filter topologies. Precision step attenuators provide 0.5 dB/step control of each output, using a proprietary technique to ensure purity in the signal path. The external power supply chassis regenerates AC and applies active regulation to every part of the circuitry.
Not sure about that; in my tonearm experiments, I purchased everything from N35 to N52, and for the same amount of 1mm thickness, the differences were quite noticeable
It is amazing how much Alon has learned since he made the Q5 almost a decade ago. I am a fan. I would suspect his followers don't mind financing his education of exiting speaker technology. As far as the M series is concerned it appears the knowledge trickled up not down. What is the saying, what goes up must come down. wish I could be the audiophile version of Betsy DeVos{s}No not her total disdain for the education of Americas youth in the pursuit of profit. I could own ten flagship speakers and need the employ of a speaker scheduler.
I have no idea if these or the WAMMS end up mostly in large living spaces or in dedicated listening rooms. Nor do I have an opinion on which aesthetic I would prefer if I ever see an actual one in person. And then there is the sound. From the photographs, I think each might make quite a statement in either setting.
We can surely criticise the high prices and decadence, and whatever else we can come up with, but I say let them duke it out. I think we benefit from the exploration of technology and the sheer willingness by these businesses to pursue such efforts.
These are the dreams of their designers. They have been successful enough to be able to pursue these dreams and make them available to others. I think it is fantastic.
We can surely criticise the high prices and decadence, and whatever else we can come up with, but I say let them duke it out. I think we benefit from the exploration of technology and the sheer willingness by these businesses to pursue such efforts.
These are the dreams of their designers. They have been successful enough to be able to pursue these dreams and make them available to others. I think it is fantastic.
I think this could probably be said of quite a few speaker designers and business owners. Designers learn from experience over time. And the happy customers, the owner, and everyone in the middle, are all benefitting from the commercial exchange.
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As a music lover and audiophile, how can you not be impressed? It will surely be a treat to see and hear these at a show. There can be no doubt they will sound good. How good is anyone's guess. But let's be a bit more circumspect when reading the not so fine print. Active crossovers with 24 dB slopes are not new, although this one, not surprisingly, promises to be very well-executed. But when I read statements such as "This substantial component provides steep filter slopes without any sacrifice in signal quality", my first reaction is that this is pure marketing hyperbole. ALL crossovers entail engineering compromises that have sonic consequences. As they say in Missouri, "show me". What city am I buying a plane ticket to so that I can experience this beast, once I have been vaccinated?
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What Alon is probably saying is that the passive components would have been so massive so as to lose a lot of the energy, as opposed to a little; he must have needed large cap and/or inductor values. And he may just wanted the option of in-situ adjustments; like many, I have also found them invaluable in my own speakers
Ime one of the tradeoffs between MTM and TM (or in this case, MT) configurations is the two slightly different arrival times from the midrange drivers in the MTM configuration, if the listener is not at the correct height. Ime this can result in a slight loss of clarity relative to the TM or MT configurations.
As for the tweeter being below the 6" midrange, which in turn is below the dual 11" lower midrange drivers, imo that makes a lot of sense from a psychoacoustic standpoint. The ear tends to mistake high frequency sounds as coming from a greater height than they actually do, and tends to mistake lower frequency sounds as coming from lower than they actually do. If I recall correctly, the ear is pretty good at judging the height of sound sources from maybe 1.5 kHz to maybe 4 or 5 kHz. (Also the ear's ability to even get an impression of the height of a sound source diminishes rapidly at bass frequencies.)
So the ear is likely to "mistake" the highs as from coming from a little bit higher up than they really do, i.e. like about at the height of the midrange cone, and likely to mistake the lows (most of which presumably come from the twin 11" cones) as coming from a bit lower than they actually do... i.e. perhaps about the height of the midrange cone. My guess is that M9 sounds unusually coherent from fairly close range, relative to most big speakers, which (along with the adjustable subwoofer section) might make it feasible in smaller rooms than its Wilson rival.
Than makes a lot of sense, though I can't help but wonder why they didn't figure out a way to have the binding posts down near the floor. I'm thinking, run a hidden umbilical accessible via a removeable panel on the back of the mid/tweet module.
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