"I spent about eight hours listening to the M9 over two days...Once the listening commenced, it was immediately apparent that the M9 was different from any other speaker I’ve heard... The sound had the remarkable quality of appearing from nowhere, completely untethered to the speakers. This characteristic was certainly related to the M9’s completely silent background as well as its stunning spatial presentation, with wide staging and continuousness of imaging. But the M9’s disappearing act went beyond these usual tropes. The impression of hearing music rather than a hi-fi system was profound. The M9 is so transparent to the music that I had the odd sensation of the speakers not being the source of the sound. Opening my eyes at the end of a piece of music, I was sometimes momentarily startled to see this pair of giants standing in front of me.....All the performances took on a heightened sense of urgency, energy, and spontaneous music-making in a way that was absolutely thrilling.....the speaker has a complete and unwavering sense of effortless ease on all music....It can scale the heights of the most demanding music without a hint of congestion or confusion. It’s just a natural, organic, immensely involving sound on any type of music and at any listening level.
Overall, I have to say that the Magico M9 is the best-sounding loudspeaker I’ve heard. It represents the ultimate realization of the accumulated knowledge and sophisticated technologies Magico has developed over the past 25 years, along with some remarkable innovations that push the M9’s performance to an unprecedented level." Robert Harley
read the review in Absolute Sound
Magico M9
A summation of our no-holds-barred assault on the limits of dynamic loudspeaker design, the new Magico M9 establishes new benchmarks in musicality, transparency, and fidelity. This four-way, six-driver floor standing system features the world’s first loudspeaker enclosure to combine inner and outer skins of carbon fiber with a revolutionary aluminum honeycomb core. Included with the M9 is a state-of-the-art analog outboard active crossover, the MXO. Designed in-house, this carefully crafted unit handles bass/midbass frequency separation. In addition, the M9 benefits from our latest generation of Nano-Tec speaker cones, featuring Aluminum honeycomb cores. The result is a revelation, a loudspeaker that can present intense crescendos with unconstrained power yet reproduce the most delicate musical passages with transparency and stunning micro-dynamic detail.
Controlling cabinet vibration without storing energy remains one of the greatest challenges in loudspeaker design. Our quest for the ultimate in enclosures has driven us to pursue the latest in materials science, computerized modeling, and meticulous assembly. The M9 represents a new milestone in that journey: the world’s first loudspeaker enclosure with carbon fiber inner and outer skins over an aluminum honeycomb core. This technology reduces overall weight yet doubles the structural stiffness.
The enclosure also incorporates our latest application of constrained layer damping using aerospace composites, plus familiar features of Magico construction including a baffle board of 6061 T6 aircraft aluminum and front-to-back tensioning rods.
Using Finite Element Analysis modeling, we calibrated the organically shaped enclosure to suppress unwanted resonances and reduce diffraction effects to near zero with a carefully machined aluminum front baffle. Sound waves from the drivers propagate without obstruction resulting in a sound field that replicates the recording space. The M9 has a commanding physical presence however sonically, it completely vanishes.
Magico has long recognized that the bending and flexing of non-pistonic motion in a soft dome tweeter leads to large-scale distortion. The new tweeter in the M9 features an even more refined 28 mm Beryllium-diamond dome tweeter. The incredibly stiff and lightweight Beryllium dome is enhanced with diamond which is carefully applied by chemical vapor deposition. This enabled us to develop the world’s first 28 mm Beryllium dome with improved performance without the weight penalty that diamond normally incurs. The new drive unit delivers high-frequency reproduction of extraordinary accuracy with micro dynamics of even greater subtlety, revealing musical detail with even greater clarity. Every cone in the M9 incorporates our eighth-generation Nano-Tec design which introduces the world’s first Aluminum honeycomb core sandwiched between Graphene/carbon fiber skins. The Aluminum honeycomb supersedes previous designs and provides a core material so stiff that 26,500 pounds (12,000 kg) of pressure is required to shape the 15-inch cones. This added stiffness pushes resonant frequencies far beyond audibility, requiring hardly any damping at all. Graphene, the hallmark of the Nano-Tec cones, is a hexagonal lattice of carbon just one atom thick. Graphene combines incredible stiffness with the highest tensile strength of any material known to science – some 40 times that of carbon steel. The eighth-generation refinements provide unprecedented strength results in the closest-ever approach to pure pistonic motion. As a cone driver plays intense musical peaks, voice coil temperatures can climb over 100° F (40° C) in a single second. Heat can double the voice coil’s DC resistance, alter the frequency response curve, and compress the music as much as 3 dB – a substantial nonlinearity. The M9 drivers overcome these distortions with oversized vented voice coils (3,4 and 5 inches in diameter) that are formed of pure Titanium for increased stiffness, resistance to eddy currents, greater cone control, and faster heat dissipation.
Magico Nano-Tec drivers exercise absolute control over voice coil movement by providing underhung voice coils in a magnetic circuit of tremendous power. Uncommonly large Neodymium ring magnets with 16 times the magnetic energy per unit volume of Ferrite form the motor system. An extra measure against asymmetry, the drivers deploy a matching magnet on top which enables distortion-free output up to 120 dB SPL at 1 meter.
The new 6-inch midrange (x1) features a 3-inch voice coil to help maintain linear output all the way to 120 dB SPL at 1 meter. This results in unmeasurably low distortion throughout the driver’s operating range.
The new 11-inch mid-bass driver (x2) features a 4-inch voice coil with 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.
The new 15-inch bass driver (x2) features a 5-inch voice coil with an uncommonly long 36 mm air gap that facilitates tremendous linear excursion, ±15 mm, at high sensitivity.
The M9 drivers represent true state of the art and are the most advanced dynamic driver designs ever offered by Magico
The new Magico Analog Crossover (MXO) was designed in-house from our own platform to manage the crossover frequency between the 15-inch bass and 11-inch mid-bass drivers.
At such a low frequency, a passive crossover would require huge inductors and capacitors which would incur substantial losses. The meticulous design of the MXO has fully balanced and discrete circuit topology with Linkwitz-Riley filters to deliver steep 24 dB per octave slopes at the crossover frequency of 120 Hz. Precision step attenuators provide 0.5 dB/step control of each output, using a proprietary technique to ensure purity in the signal path. Open architecture accommodates additional filter topologies. The external power supply chassis regenerates AC and applies active regulation to every part of the circuitry.
A pair of M9 loudspeakers requires two stereo or four monaural amplifiers. The M9 tweeter, midrange and mid-bass drivers are controlled by a three-way passive crossover with acoustical target 24 dB-per-octave Linkwitz-Riley filters. Magico’s elliptical symmetry crossover design preserves maximum frequency bandwidth with minimal IM distortion.
Reviews
"I heard the vastest sense of space I’ve ever heard when listening to reproduced music—the “sound” of the listening room morphed into a performance space. The experience was almost like that of a good planetarium—the soundstage didn’t exist as an entity in front of me; it was a continuous space, unbroken by boundaries that would define depth or width or height. This was beyond simply room-filling. It was space-defining"
"The best, that is. Yes, it’s the best sound I’ve ever heard. What’s really crazy about my experience is that I don’t feel I tested the limits of what a pair of M9s can truly do."
read the review in Soundstage
Specifications
Driver Complement:
1.1” (2.8cm) Diamond Coated Beryllium Dome Tweeter (x1)
6-inch Gen 8 Magico Nano-Tec cone with Aluminum honeycomb core (x1)
11-inch Gen 8 Magico Nano-Tec cones with Aluminum honeycomb core (x2)
15-inch Gen 8 Magico Nano-Tec cones with Aluminum honeycomb core (x2)
Sensitivity: 94 dB
Impedance: 4 ohms
Frequency response: 18 Hz – 50 kHz
Power handling: 20 W (min) to 2000 W (max)
Dimensions:
Loudspeaker: 80” H x 40” D x 29” W (203 x 102 x 51 cm)
MXO Crossover: 8” H x 18” D x 20” W (20 x 46 x 51 cm)
MXO Crossover power supply: 8” H x 18” D x 20” W (20 x 46 x 51 cm)
Weight:
Loudspeaker: 1000 pounds (454 kg) each
MXO Crossover: 40 lbs. (18 kg)
MXO Crossover power supply: 60 lbs. (27 kg)
