The Q3 employs superb engineering to great effect
There’s no magical mystery about Magico’s Q3. It simply represents a rootand- branch engineering re-think of the ‘art’ of loudspeaker design, from the bolts that hold the cabinet together to the bespoke ‘Nano-Tec’ drivers and beryllium dome tweeter.
But it’s not some daft ‘concept speaker’, where form overrides function. Nor is there anything especially touchy-feely about the huge black slabs of aluminium that clad the outside of the layered cabinet or the 287 steel bolts that bind this composite and its internal alloy matrix together.
The PB1i is the latest PMC speaker to get the Signature treatment
One key difference is a revised crossover network featuring custom-made chokes and tuning by PMC founder and designer Peter Thomas. The driver complement remains twin PMC-designed 170mm bass drivers with cast magnesium chassis, and a SEAS/PMC co-developed 27mm soft dome tweeter. In between these is PMC’s legendary 75mm dome midrange unit, isolated in its own enclosure. The speaker also gets a brushed aluminium serial number plate, a certificate signed by Peter, and an array of nickel finished driver bolts.
The Aurum range arrives in the UK packed with bespoke technology
This floorstander is no larger or more extravagantly equipped than many in this area of the market, but it is notably more substantial than the norm, at 31kg, and better finished too. Moreover, for a premium, there are numerous alternative finishes.
Twin 170mm aluminium/ titanium/magnesium coned bass units work in parallel up to a specified 330Hz crossover and are reflex loaded by a single large rearfiring port. The distinctive slats we saw in the Titan VII are echoed in an array of vertical rubber cords that adorn the cut-out through which the recessed bass units radiate – in fact these appear to be part of the reflex/pressure chamber bass loading principle.
Limited to a mere 30 pairs, is this the world's ultimate loudspeaker?
This flagship design will be limited to 30 pairs. It stands 1. 7m tall and weighs a staggering 305kg. There are five main drive units: a 15in subwoofer with a sandwich cone made by Audio Technology of Denmark.
Classy German design matches fine build to engaging sonics
Elac’s F247 Sapphire is finished with the sumptuous attention to detail. A slim, elegant floorstander boasts an eye-catching front baffle and mirror-like piano black finish. Elac’s signature JET tweeter and a pair of its multifaceted aluminium mid/bass drivers are fitted.
These unusual cones are an aluminium sandwich design with cellulose filling, shaped to reduce unwanted vibrations.
Innovative when released, the Celestion is still capable of entertaining results
Launched at the Harrogate Hi-Fi Show in 1981, the Celestion SL6 looked different, and it was more different than it looked. In essence, its all-new drive units had been designed with the help of Celestion’s then-unique and revolutionary laser-based vibration analysis measurement system. It was the first British speaker to use a metal-dome tweeter, but the bass unit was equally innovative.
This clever little speaker still sounds more than respectable
An audio pioneer, Jim Rogers possessed real acoustic engineering talent as well as in electronics. The original Rogers folded corner horn may not offer true stereophonic reproduction, but it’s a fine room-filling beast. And as for the later flat-to-the-wall Wafer speakers, based on Philips drive units and measuring just 2in thick, these are surprisingly magicalsounding. Then there’s the JR149.
The professional heritage of the brand is present and correct in the SCMII
You know the deal when you buy an ATC, whatever its price tag. A flat frequency response and tight pair matching are assured together with low coloration and low distortion from ATC’s own meticulously designed drive units. Forget metal dome tweeters or metal-coned bass units – ATC prefers more traditional diaphragm materials, with doping applied to quell resonances. And in its smaller speakers it has always preferred closed box to reflex bass loading, in further rejection of fashion.
This big French three way is strong value for money
You’d scarcely credit that the MC40 Minorca is the cheapest speaker here. It’s larger than the ATC, Dynaudio and PSB, it has a piano black finish (a £140 cost option, standard finishes being cherry and purple cherry wood veneers) and, unlike all the others, it’s a three-way rather than a two-way design.
Cabasse’s distinctive BC10 coaxial driver is responsible for that last feature, comprising a soft dome tweeter, with shallow horn loading, surrounded by a convex annular diaphragm that handles the frequency range between 900Hz and 3. 2kHz crossover points.
Despite the small size, this well thought out design has much to commend it
As the smallest and lightest speaker here, the Synchrony Two B may seem to be flying a kite in asking £1200 of its buyer. And, indeed, it is significantly cheaper in its native North America. But remember that its sibling, the large, floorstanding Synchrony One, won our group test in Aug ’09 – and take a look at the lab report. It may be diminutive but the Synchrony Two B walks tall: it has one of the flattest on-axis frequency responses here and a waterfall plot so clean that few more overtly prestigious speakers can match it.
The updates to this long running range have proved particularly effective
Dynaudio’s Focus range was getting a bit long in the tooth so we weren’t surprised to learn when we requested the 140 for this test that it had just been replaced with this new model, the 160. Little has changed externally – if you’re the type who can distinguish Aston Martins at a glance then you’ll note a new light grey paint finish on the drivers and the use of Torx fasteners, only three of which now attach the tweeter – but internally there’s more that’s been breathed on.
As before, the cabinet side walls taper a little towards the rear from the narrow bevels at the front baffle edges – a feature which helps tame internal standing waves – but the enclosure has been significantly stiffened. The 170mm bass-mid driver retains its magnesium silicate polymer (MSP) cone, and the voice coil is still aluminium to reduce moving mass.
Some very sophisticated technology doesn't quite come together as a cohesive whole
In loudspeaker cabinet construction, curves are good. Curved panels are stiffer than equivalent flat ones – but more difficult to make than the V-groove and wrap box construction that so many speakers today employ. In creating what is the most expensive model in this month’s group, Mordaunt-Short clearly devoted a good deal of its budget to abandoning the traditional rectangular wooden cabinet in favour of a curvaceous enclosure moulded from a well damped polymer resin. Deeper at the bottom than at the top, in profile it looks positively Falstaffian.
Monitor Audio pushed the boat out with its prestigious PL300 floorstanders in 2007, the first speakers in its then new Platinum range to employ an in-house designed ribbon tweeter. Later came the more affordable PL200s with a slightly smaller footprint, £5000 three-ways whose sharp clarity and fi nesse impressed me greatly when we reviewed them in Dec ’09.
Below the company’s flagship Platinum range comes the Gold series: substantially more affordable speakers with less elaborately constructed enclosures and drive units. The Gold GS models, in the market since 2006, have been replaced this year by an entirely new Gold line-up now called GX.
The high-end hi-fi industry is perhaps unique – certainly unusual – in that it continually holds the present to account, against its past. Many audiophiles, often not with nostalgia foremost among their motivations, wilfully divest themselves of the ‘benefi ts’ of modern technology, preferring vinyl to digital, vacuum electronics to solid state and full-range drive units to the meticulously developed multidriver speakers that purport to represent the state of the art.
If we think of this as a spectrum of design approaches rather than Montagues versus Capulets, the Aurousal VSx – the new, improved version of the VS that won our group test in HFN Aug ’10 – is certainly not at the extreme occupied by single-ended triodes and re-entrant horns. Although the VSx does turn the clock backwards somewhat: in eschewing multiple drivers knitted together with a crossover network in favour of a pair of full-range drivers supplemented by a dome tweeter.
A large panel speaker, certainly, but the Omega is not a dopplegänger from audio’s past
Apogees, surely, risen from audio’s graveyard of well-intentioned but utterly impractical ideas? That’ll be the first thought of every red-bloodied audiophile who glances at these pages. But despite the astonishing resemblance in shape, distribution of drivers and slate grey colour of these door-sized dipoles to Apogee’s long-mourned full-range ribbons, they’d be mistaken.
Indeed, under the skin Analysis Audio’s Omega loudspeakers have little in common with their erstwhile lookalikes. Sure enough, they employ a long ribbon mid/treble driver down the inside edge of the large flat MDF baffle but the trapezoidal bass panel is a planar-magnetic design, far closer in execution to that of Magneplanar’s current crop [HFN, Mar ’11].
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