Review: The Magneplanar MG12/QR - "Losing (and Finding) My Religion" - by Wayne Garcia (Fi)

Let's face it: human nature is such that we just can't help taking things for granted. The more we know something the less attention we're likely to give it. Take my history with Magnepans...

One day in the early 1970s I happened to walk into Garland Audio, then the Bay Area's most exotic high-fidelity salon, and heard reproduced music as I'd never heard it before-or even imagined was possible. The record playing was Decca/London's great Mehta-conducted Turandot with Pavarotti, Sutherland, and Caball'e. Puccini's spaghetti & won-ton soup of an opera wasn't coming from a pair of conventional box speakers but from what looked like a pair of folding dressing room screens (someone I once worked with loved to joke that they should have been displayed with a bra and pair of stockings casually tossed over them, like something from a bachelor's pad in a Playboy cartoon). The speakers were Magneplanar Tympani 1 Us-I was stunned. Compared to anything else I'd heard until then, the music they made seemed so much more realistic; their sonic transparency allowed them to "disappear" and present a huge window on the music that made them seem so alive, as if not just the sound but the very spirit of the musicians were there in the room. I didn't have the space for a pair of the six-foot-tall, four-foot-wide, oneinch-thick, three-panel Tympanis back then, which dovetailed nicely with the fact that I also didn't have the money to buy a pair (or the big amps required to drive them).

But pretty soon there appeared a more affordable, easier to place and drive, single panel Magneplanar, the MG 11 ($600 a pairin those, the budding days of high end). I bought myself a pair, took them home and soaked up music like a sponge. One record I wore out was The King James Version, Sheffield Labs' first-and best-direct-to-disc recording of Harry James and his big band. Funny thing ... I wasn't even a fan of big band music. I mean, though I-like every other teenager back then-played guitar in a bad garage band, obviously loved rock 'n' roll (especially English, and to prove it I covered the front of my home-made guitar speaker cabinet with a Union Jack grille cloth), and had been listening to classical for a few years by then-but big band?-that was my parents' music. What could be more square than that? Yet for me those record grooves held magic. First, man, those guys could swing. They played their asses off. But I have to admit it was the sheer beauty of the sound that got me. The near-magical sensation of life-sized instruments being played by life-sized men who-instead of being boxedin like some frustrated pope in a Francis Bacon canvas-seemed to be standing in the room with a jaw-dropping you-are-thereness that I remember to this day.

A few years later, instead of getting a real job, I found myself selling audio at the retail level. I sold lots of Magnepans, too, usually overcoming the "they're too big for our room" objections customers had-until they gave them a listen. But then, newer, sexier, more "room friendly" speakers came and went and the Maggies often just sat there, I hate to admit it-ignored. Oh, every three-to-five years, Magnepan introduced newer models, but, well ... you know, I took them for granted. And until very recently, I'd not had a pair in my home for at least fifteen years.

All right, get ready, 'cause many of you are probably going to roll your eyes over what follows and think that it's just a load of reviewer hyperbole-over-the-top, exaggerated-or mere misty-eyed nostalgia. But trust me, it's not. What it is is simply this: the newest model from Magnepan, the twoway, quasi-ribbon-sporting MG 12/QR which sell for the astonishingly benign price of $1,199 per pair-are among the most musically realistic sounding speakers I've heard of late. And though designer Jim Winey and the boys of White Bear Lake (Minnesota, where the company hails from) have made

big improvements to these babies over the years, you wanna know something? The reasons why I first loved these speakers twentyfive years ago are exactly the same as why I love them today. But then, if you've been following Fi you'll know that I'm not alone. Our editor Jonathan Valin has been singing the praises of these flat-panels for awhile now. And although JV and I have similar sonic taste, and I've heard various Maggies myself at one show or another over the last few years, this is a yet another reminder that until one really spends some time-at home-with a pair of these speakers (or any audio component for that matter), words on paper, no matter how dudelicious, can convey but a fraction of the sensation one has while listening. (Therefore, don't trust this review, get thee out and hear a pair for yourself.)

First, please note this: Magnepans are not cool because they perform the kind of hi-fi pyrotechnics audiophiles are so impressed by (you know, laser-etched holographic imaging, resolution so extraordinary you can count the exact number of musicians in the New York Philharmonic, etc.); they're cool because they sound more convincingly like the sound of live music than most other speakers do-even if they may not "show" you as much as other fine speakers might (though they actually do, in different ways, as I'll try to explain). Though Magneplanars are very detailed (and larger Maggies are more detailed than the MG 12/ QRs), it's a different kind of detail than most other speakers, even electrostatics, provide. Magneplanar detail is musical detail. It's that thing Jonathan Valin calls "action," and which I interpret as the immediacy or presence of an instrument-and how it launches air into a room, which is one of the fundamental differences between live music and what we typically get at home with our technically sophisticated, yet strangely crude (when compared to the sound of the real thing), collection of assembled electronica. This is what Linn's Ivor Tiefenbrun was getting at those many years ago when he used to talk about how we know, instantly, when walking down a street whether or not the music we hear coming from an open window is being played by a real person or over a hi-fi. Obviously, none of the usual audiogab can describe that sound-it simply is. It's what we all want our audio gear to give us-that feeling of a direct link to the musicians without a lot of boxes, wires, and electronic paraphernalia getting in the way. With the Magnepans, you get that. Not because they're transparent, (though they are), not because they're quick, (though they are-very), but because the way the panel projects air into our rooms, combined with the exceptional tonal seamlessness only full-range panels can provide, doesn't just give us a bunch of disconnected notes but instead preserves the logical trail of one to the other.

In his Totem/PSB review elsewhere in this issue, Mark Lehman tells a story of how, after attending a concert, JV likened the difference between the live musical experience and the home audio experience to looking at a painting in person versus looking at a reproduction of it in a book. Since JV discussed this with me at length around that same time I'd like to expand on it here.

Imagine yourself standing in front of a great painting in a museum, say a Van Gogh self-portrait. Its presence as a man-made object is inarguable, right? It's not just the rough-textured evidence of the canvas, or the swirls and blobs of paint, or the trails of the brushes that put it there, but Van Gogh's presence-the unmistakable "signature" of his hand. Because not only was he standing more or less in exactly the samespot (relative to the canvas) while painting it that you are now in while looking at it, but his artistry-the act of painting itselfis an inseparable part of the image he created. Those red-hot brush strokes were laid down with the same kind of spontaneity that Coltrane summoned when improvising a solo, and each individual brush stroke is just as important to the finished painting as each musical note is to the composition it's part of-the difference is that the brushstrokes are fixed in time and space, the musical notes disappear like shooting stars.

Now, on the way out of the museum you stop by the gift shop. You purchase a book which contains a reproduction of the selfportrait. You take the book home, open it, look through it a few times and ... probably never open the book again. Why? The painting is well-reproduced. The colors are pretty close. Everything seems to be there. Of course, it is smaller. You can't see the finest details but the brushstrokes are clear-the book even has an enlarged detail which clearly shows the strokes. The reason you were riveted to the real painting and never look at the book again is simplecompared to the real thing the reproduction in the book is dead. No matter how good the reproduction may be, what makes the original great, captivating, nearly impossible to take your eyes from, has been replaced by a static impersonation that leaves you about as intellectually and emotionally engaged as a bowl of cold porridge. That's just what audio gear can be like when it gets "everything right" but for some reason loses the musical essence. Nothing is obviously missing, but the soul has been stolen, or at least altered in such a way that it pales compared to a live event.

Now say you saw another painting in the show that happened to be displayed behind a pane of glass. Details of color, texture, and line may be flattened out, but the spirit of the piece remains intact. In other words, although the glass is still a barrier to the original, introducing subtle distortions of color, line, and texture, as well as reflecting glare and the images of other objects and people in the room, its soul remains true. That ability to somehow get us that much closer to the real thing despite barriers in the record/ playback process-to be more like a pane of glass than a mere picture in a book-is what makes Magnepans great speakers.

This really hit home one night while I was playing Mosaic's The Complete Candid Recordings of Charles Mingus. The sound of Eric Dolphy's alto saxophone was close to ideal-swooping, jabbing, flickering-but it was his instrument's exceptional presence that made me jump with the kind of surprised awe that happens at live concerts, but rarely does in playback. This immediacy, this lack of electro -mechanical interference, has a lot to do with the Maggie's (relative) lack of driver-movement coloration, which let me hear into what Dolphy was doingalmost into the way he was thinking-as his solo developed.

This notion of driver coloration isn't a new thing. Metal-dome tweeters are often singled out for ringing, and certain plasticbased or aluminum woofers have their own sounds as well. And yes, Magnepan's magnetic-planar, and to a lesser degree, the quasi-ribbon sections (but not the pure ribbon tweeters), have a slightly grainy, slightly whitish sound to them that bothers some listeners more than others (very early Magnepans were notorious for this). I'm certainly aware of this (relatively slight) coloration with the MG12s, but to these ears it is far less objectionable than overt box colorations and the driver noises that some dynamic speakers have. I think the main reason for this is because the character of the planar- magnetic/quasi-ribbon sound is so uniform across the frequency range that it doesn't stick out as more frequency-specific colorations do.

Getting back to Mingus and friends, the sound of Mingus' upright bass and the cut "Melody From The Drum" reminded me just how great, how natural and devoid of added resonance, Magneplanar bass is. These things are spooky-real with wellrecorded drums (the speakers are stretched timpanic membranes, after all). You want to hear Dannie Richmond's drum stick snap off the head of his snare with the combination of frightening power yet lightness which snares have in life (like a stone skipping across a river), feel the size of the drum itself (fully grown, not some miniaturized version), and picture the texture of the head so effortlessly that you can imagine its surface cratered and blackened from use? Then hear it on a pair of Maggies. And it's not just the snare-from kick drum to toms to the array of cymbals between them, the MG 12/QRs can lay out a set in a very convincing way (and I Would argue that letting you hear the exact relative placement of each piece as it's being struck is no mere hi-fi trick but vital to this sense of "thereness").

There are lots of other musical details I discovered with the Maggies. F'r instance, though I've listened to the 20-bit re-issue of Sinatra at the Sands [Reprise] a zillion times (is that 20-bits?) and over lots of different gear, hearing it on the 12/QRs revealed phrasings in Sinatra's lines I never knew were there. Little things, to be sure, but what a joy to discover them-like the way he slips in the word "kiss" in "Fly Me To The Moon": "In other words/hold my hand/ In other words/BABYkissssssMe!" Or the way little muted trumpet accents shyly emerge from the rest of the band, or guitar runs that shimmy by so fast they're like a mirage, or a rim-shot that accents a phrase like a beauty spot on Marilyn Monroe's face. These "extras" added a new dimension to my appreciation of this music-and made it just that much more thrilling and engaging too.

And on it goes. If you're a rock fan you'll love the gunslinger-fast interplay of electric guitars and Charlie Watts' percussive back beats at the opening of the Stones' "Start Me Up," from Tattoo You [Rolling Stones Records], or the way these speakers will show you just how exaggerated the multimono "stereo" mix of Rubber Soul [EMIJ is, and how the acoustic guitars on "Norwegian Wood" sound, well, more like acoustic guitars, and more like men playing acoustic guitars as their plastic picks zing across vibrating steel strings stretched over a wooden body. Planar speakers move air in a way that is fundamentally different from their point source counterparts. This is one of the reasons that instruments and voices sound so natural over them-it's the volume of air that changes, not the size of the instruments. With that in mind, it's hard to imagine large orchestral works being better served than they are by Magnepans, so lifelike and full-scale is the soundstage (which in my room was akin to first-tier, not orchestra, seating) and so effortless their ability to swing to full orchestral climaxes.

No sound is ideal for every listener. Some will prefer the more up-front presentation dynamic speakers provide, or a punchier bass or zingier highs. That's cool. But show me a speaker that allows the entire frequency range, all instrumental tone colors, and the acoustic space itself to be presented whole; show me a speaker which can open up a soundstage and place everything from Dylan's harmonica to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra within it in a way that-if you close your eyes-is just that much closer to what we hear in life; and show me a speaker that can offer this much value and long-term listenability, and I'll show you a speaker that's just right for me.