64 The Absolute Sound's Buyer's Guide to Loudspeakers www.theabsolutesound.com

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It started well over a decade ago. There I was in audio store listening to a pair of traditional moving-

coil loudspeakers coupled to an Audio Research amplifier. The sound was excellent but didn’t really move me. Then a pair of Magnepan 3.6 loudspeakers was substituted for the cone speakers. All of a sudden a huge soundstage emerged. The chorus sounded lifelike. I had found my entry ticket into the high end.

Magnepan 3.7iSpooky Real

Jacob Heilbrunn

So it’s with more than ordinary interest that I’ve followed Magnepan’s recent efforts to improve its speaker line. Over a year ago, at the behest of the company’s marketing guru Wendell Diller, I traveled to Magnepan’s headquarters in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. A summons from Diller, after all, is not to be taken lightly. He’s been around the high-end industry for decades, helping a host of fanatics track Magnepan’s every move.

In fact, Diller’s efforts may have succeeded better than he always finds comfortable. Take a look at the Internet forums and you’ll quickly find that almost every aspect of Magnepan loudspeakers is discussed, analyzed, and scrutinized, down to the type of staples and

glues the company employs to construct them. Everything that goes into a Magnepan

loudspeaker matters. A lot. I spent a number of years tinkering with my 20.1 loudspeaker to improve its sound. If you know anything about Magnepan, then you’re probably aware that its loudspeakers are very inexpensive compared to the performance they offer, and this is so because the company pinches pennies wherever and whenever it can. My pet peeve had always been that Magnepan has on occasion taken this principle too far, when, for a modest outlay, it could extract even greater performance. But lo and behold, even Magnepan can apparently be prodded to invest more in its hardware. (My understanding is that its longtime neighbor and friend, the Audio Research Corporation, finally drummed it into Magnepan’s collective heads that capacitors actually do affect the sound.) When I listened to the company’s new flagship 20.7 loudspeaker during my visit to the factory, it didn’t take long to hear that upgrading the capacitors and running the midrange panel in phase with the bass and ribbon tweeter had greatly improved the presentation.

This was a big deal for planar aficionados because the blunt fact is that changes at Magnepan don’t happen very often. The company has historically moved at a pace as glacial as the weather in White Bear Lake. It thus took more than ten years for Magnepan to move from the 20.1 to the 20.7 loudspeaker. Next Magnepan introduced the 3.7 loudspeaker, which superseded the 3.6. And there matters seemed to rest. Magnepan would sit pat for another decade or so, right?

Well, no. It has now come out with an upgraded version of the 3.7 called the 3.7i (owners of the former can upgrade to the latter for $500). For

most other loudspeaker companies this fairly rapid shift would be no big deal. But for Magnepan it is tantamount to epic change. To make matters even more mysterious, Maggie won’t divulge what upgrade it has performed to the 3.7i. It simply wants you to (gulp) trust your ears.

I’m a fairly trusting fellow, but as a veteran fan of Magnepan I have to admit that I was more than a mite curious to see if the company’s claims were justified, or if Maggie were just blowing smoke. So when Diller asked if I might be interested in reviewing the new 3.7i, I bit. A few weeks after I assented, a pair of oblong brown boxes landed on my doorstep. Diller himself showed up a few days later to help set them up, which did not take long at all. We listened to several amplifiers, Diller pronounced himself besotted with the Ypsilon SET 100 Ultimate monoblocks; the overall sound was superb, and that was that.

Or so I thought. What I didn’t initially realize was the extent to which the 3.7i has improved its performance when compared to its predecessors. In dynamic power and transient speed, in coherence and smoothness, the 3.7i represents a substantial advance. Despite the glories of Maggie’s ribbon tweeter, it has always stuck out a bit, requiring some taming with a resistor. This Band-Aid is no longer necessary. Magnepan has performed some engineering jiggerypook that appears to have banished the sense that the tweeter is just a mite faster and hence edgier than the mid and bass panels. In the bad old days, I would sometimes flinch when a particularly violent transient was sounded in the treble region. No longer. You can listen with pleasure for hours on end to the 3.7i without fatigue. It is a loudspeaker that pulls such a disappearing act that it barely seems to be present.

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EQUIPMENT REVIEW - Magnepan 3.7i

Type: Three-way planar-

magnetic/true ribbon

loudspeaker

Frequency response:

35Hz–40kHz

Sensitivity:

86dB/500Hz/2.83v

Impedance: 4 ohms

Dimensions: 24" x 71" x

1.625"

Price: $5995

MAGNEPAN INC.

1645 Ninth Street

White Bear Lake, MN 55110

(651) 625-1425

magnepan.com

ASSOCIATED EQUIPMENT

Continuum Caliburn

turntable with two Cobra

tonearms, Lyra Atlas

and Miyajima Zero mono

cartridges, dCS Vivaldi

CD/SACD playback

system, Accustic Arts

tube hybrid preamplifier

and monoblock amplifiers,

Ypsilon PST-100 Mk 2

phonostage, Transparent

Opus and Nordost Valhalla

2 cabling, and Stillpoints

Ultra SS isolation feet

The truth is that the longer you listen to the 3.7i, the more addictive listening to it becomes. I’m not ashamed to confessit. I fell hard for the ethereal sound of this Magnepan. It hit me as I lowered the needle to listen to one of my favorite LPs. All of a sudden the sound just flowed, transmuting the room into a concert hall. The same phenomenon occurred when listening to CDs. It’s almost as if an audible tension had been released from the music. This speaker seems to let out a big sigh and just let the music emerge in a holistic fashion.

In fact, one of the most endearing characteris-tics of the 3.7i is its gossamer-like continuity on acoustic instruments. My chum Jonathan Valin

has written at length about what he likes to call the ability of a stereo system to reproduce the “action” of an instrument. With the 3.7i that qual-ity can almost be taken for granted, so absent is any sense of strain or fatigue. The 3.7i anneals the action of an instrument to a lissome quality, a sense of continuity that is extremely enticing. The remarkable fluidity of the 3.7i came home to me in listening to Murray Perahia playing Han-del’s Chaconne in G major—there was an eman-cipation of the sound from mere rote recapitula-tion of the notes into a realm of sonic bliss. Again, the lissome quality of the 3.7i returned to me on a splendid recording of Bach’s flute sonata on the Delos label played by Joshua Smith on flute and Jory Vinikour on harpsichord.

The Maggie’s sense of continuity extends to the acid test of any loudspeaker—the reproduction of the human voice. The ease with which the 3.7i reproduces same is simply uncanny. It’s not just that you hear a well-defined acoustic space in which the recording took place. It’s again—for lack of a better word—that sense of naturalness with which it hovers in the room. On the album Strike Up the Band [Roulette], a Count Basie and Tony Bennett collaboration, Bennett’s effervescent ebullience came through loud and clear. It was possible to track just about every inflection in his baritone, not to mention the wonderful muted trumpet obbligato by one of my all-time favorite and highly underrated trumpeters, the great Joe Newman.

The continuity, the lack of a sense of one driver handing off to another, is important because music, of course, simply emanates across the sonic spectrum as though it were cut from the same cloth. Musicians rarely talk about the bass

region, let alone the midrange. They don’t really think in those terms. At most they might refer to the tessitura region of a coloratura soprano, or brass players might talk about seeking the holy grail of a double high C. The 3.7i offers a reminder of the artificiality of thinking in terms of a midrange or bass (not that audiophiles can dispense with these terms because they obviously serve a descriptive purpose). But it is the great virtue of the 3.7i to dispense, by and large, with these considerations in the listening, and simply pour gobs of music into a room.

None of this will probably come as a great shock to planar fans. But what about the traditional weaknesses of a planar design? How does the 3.7i do with dynamics, imaging, and bass?

I’m not going to tell you that the 3.7i trounces a moving-coil design when it comes to these parameters of performance. That would be nonsense. What I can tell you is that Magnepan has quite audibly improved in these areas. Whether the improvements are enough to banish any lingering doubts is a question that can only be answered by auditioning them yourself.

The weakest point of the 3.7i is clearly its bass response. Bass reproduction is, of course, highly room dependent, but I’ve always found that Magnepan designs start to roll off pretty quickly in the deep bass. However, the upside of a planar design is that you obtain very quick and accurate bass. On the Ron Carter quartet LP Parfait [Milestone], I was impressed by these very qualities. The suppleness of Ray Brown’s bass also came through beautifully on the cut “Blues in the Bassment” on an Impulse! LP. In fact, I never felt the need to augment the 3.7i

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65 Guide to Cables, Power Products, Accessories, & Music

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EQUIPMENT REVIEW - Magnepan 3.7i

with a subwoofer, though Magnepan does offer its own supplementary bass panel. The downside, if you deploy Magnepan’s extra panel, is that it will make it considerably

more difficult for the amplifier to drive both speaker and bass panel, though most solid-state amplifiers should be able to handle the load.

The places where I feel that the 3.7i has made the greatest strides are dynamics and imaging. Older Magnepans used to force you, more or less, to remain frozen in your seat, equidistant from the loudspeakers. Somehow—once again I can’t tell you how as Diller seems to have taken an oath of omerta about why specific improvements have occurred—you can now listen from a variety of positions without losing a sense of the center image. Depth of image is also more precise, something that manifests itself on things large and small, from a bass drum pounding in back of an orchestra to the clink of knives and forks in the rear of jazz club.

Nor is this all. Let’s face it: Planar loudspeakers have always been dynamically challenged, partly because of their low sensitivity. This doesn’t mean that they can’t play loudly. In fact, they often have to be played at the loudest volumes to get them to “come to life.” But what they lacked, even at loud levels, was dynamic contrast.

The 3.7i is a dynamic cheetah in comparison to its somewhat lugubrious ancestors. This Magnepan moves so fast on congas, for example, that it creates an indelible whoosh of dynamic alacrity and punch. I never felt the need to crank the 3.7i up. Quite the contrary. It was a pleasure to listen to it at reduced volumes, where it conveyed the emotion of music with great authenticity.

Last but hardly least is that, in audiophile terms, this is a high-resolution loudspeaker. No, it’s not going to starkly isolate each note and hold it up for inspection and dissection. But its astounding coherence means that it provides a sense of the gestalt of, say, an actual jazz club venue that is well nigh unsurpassed in my experience.

As you can tell, I’m once again quite smitten by what Magnepan is purveying. The 3.7i is not a perfect loudspeaker, but then again no speaker has attained perfection. And its resolution means that to extract the most from it you’re going to need to spend a bit to drive it properly. Diller himself, for all his thrifty propensities was most taken with the Ypsilon monoblocks, which retail for $125,000. I hasten to add that it’s not necessary to go to that length to achieve great sound. I spent a lot of time listening to the Accustic Arts preamplifier and amplifier, which are much more reasonably priced.

But whatever amp you choose, Magnepan will offer a unique experience, particularly for acoustic music. Listening to the 3.7i reinforced my sense that to listen to a Magnepan loudspeaker is almost tantamount to entering a separate musical reality. Talk about spooky. If a stereo system is about suspending disbelief, then few products suspend it better than the 3.7i.

Fast forward to 5th generation Silver; the initial design goals set out

by Dean Hartley and his colleagues in the UK remained unchanged - a value driven rangeof high performance loudspeakers with a focus on clarity through the mid-band, 3-dimensional imaging,

bass extension and control at loud volumes.

Advancements in engineering through an extensive investment in R&D, has resulted in the development

of all new C-CAM® drivers and this latest generation of Award Winning Silver Series.

From the bookshelf Silver 1 loudspeakeFrom the bookshelf Silver 1 loudspeaker, to the ‘Award Winning’ Silver 2, to the ‘Product of the Year’ Silver 6, to the high

performance Silver 8 and 10, Monitor Audio delivers on the promise of Silver being your #1 choice for

‘Affordable, High-End Loudspeakers’.

Hear what you’ve been missing...

Available in furniture quality, real-wood veneers or high gloss finishes at fine retailers throughout North America. Silver series

Silver 10“...one of the best $2,500-and-

under full-range floorstanders

I’ve heard.”- Spencer Holbert,

The Absolute Sound

Dec. 2014

Silver 8“I've been looking at speakers

for $3,000/pair or less for a

while, and have not heard any

that I would prefer to the

Monitor Audio Silver 8."

- Kalman Rubinson- Kalman Rubinson

Stereophile, Jan. 2015

Silver 6PRODUCT OF THE YEAR

- SoundStage, 2014

“You need to hear them.

Pronto.” - What Hi-Fi?

Dec. 2013 Dec. 2013

Silver 2“...the tweeter reveals real

delicacy that makes rivals

seem rather ragged in

comparison.”- Hi-Fi Choice

Dec. 2014Dec. 2014

www.monitoraudiousa.comwww.kevro.com

Contents | On the Horizon | Sneak Previews | Further Thoughts | Desktop and Powered | Bookshelf, Stand-Mount | Floorstanding <$10K | Floorstanding >$10K | Subwoofers

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