Or – when does an S5 stop being an S5?
By Roy Gregory
When Magico launched the S3 in Munich two shows ago, it marked a sea-change in both the quality of their show presentations but also the musicality of their products. Here was a compact floorstander that really did deliver on its promise, ably demonstrating – even under show conditions – the full breadth of the Magico playbook, despite its modest dimensions and almost approachable price (€65,000 including sales tax). Even many of those previously critical of Magico’s show-sound (including me) found themselves seduced… The S3 was followed in Munich last year by a new S5, now dubbed the S5 2024, a product that presented the brand and listeners with a different set of challenges.
The S5 has always been amongst Magico’s most popular models in Europe and the UK, its combination of manageable size and wide-bandwidth performance at a genuinely approachable price making it an attractive option in the smaller, solidly built rooms so often found this side of the Atlantic. This was a speaker that audiophiles could actually aspire to and save up for – and many of them did.
So, you might expect the new S5 to be greeted with some excitement. After all, it offers the same compact dimensions and familiar appearance, along with the same wide bandwidth performance – at least on paper. But also on paper, at the bottom of the page, you find the price: for those familiar with the previous model, that’s a gulp-inducing €105,000! That’s not a step up in cost, it’s a bound of Beamon-like proportions… And that without visibly changing much at all – at least on the surface. However, look quite a bit closer (and dig quite a bit deeper) and you you realise that things ain’t quite what they seem…
Although the S5 2024 is superficially identical to previous models – same basic size, essential shape and driver complement – there are no common or interchangeable mechanical parts or drivers shared between the new model and the old. Despite being topologically identical, there’s been a lot happening in the background and it’s had a transformative impact on the S5 – under its skin. The real story here is not so much the different parts themselves, but just how clearly Magico has been able to understand and (literally) shape their contribution (or lack of it) to the speaker’s overall performance.
A lot of that hinges on the company’s acquisition of two new measurement tools: a highly sophisticated Polytec laser vibrometer with a multi-point measurement capability and a full Klippel 3D acoustic measurement system. Between them, the two systems provide a massive increase in available data, allowing the engineers to accurately model the mechanical behaviour of drivers and cabinet and the acoustic performance of the complete system, down to 20Hz, at an almost granular level. It’s a degree of insight into overall system performance that it’s impossible to achieve anechoically, into the product’s mechanical behaviour that it’s impossible to calculate in other ways, at least in a timely fashion, with less sophisticated systems. As Magico’s Alon Wolf says, “it represents the end of guesswork, making you realise just how much guesswork went into your earlier designs!”
