Magico Q5

I'm a little cynical when it comes to JV reviews. He seems to go through speakers like toilet paper. His latest speaker is always the greatest since slice bread. Since he is a reviewer for a well established mag, he doesn't pay for his equipment. His speakers are on "indefinite loan" by the manufacturer. The two Magicos I'm very familiar with, the Mini and M5, have never sounded like real music to me. But I really hope the Q5 is a different kind of speaker. If it offers similar flavor of sound I heard witn the Mini and M5, you can count me out. I might give a serious audition of a Mini version of the Q5, if the Q5 lives up to its reputation.

Wait these things already went up in price, really? What they were out 4 months before they went up. Hi-end is going to price itself into extinction.

I read the article when it came out but did not feel it was worth posting. Every speaker he reviews is the "best loudspeaker I have ever heard".... its getting old. They really need to have measurements with these types of reviews. At the very least an in-room frequency response would help. TAS could use the National Research Council of Canada for a baseline (actually the manufacture could too...). Until then I pretty much blow off their reviews.

I should note I have not heard any magico speaker yet.

James63, JV does sometimes publish the in room freq response of the speaker he reviews - he did it for the M5 which has been "on loan" to him for the past 2 years. IMO, Magico really needs to rely on a more credible reviewer than JV. He has cried wolf too many times in his reviews.

I also heard the Magico Model 6, a $130k+ speaker. I am sad to say it was one of the most unmusical megabuck speaker I have ever heard. After enduring 20 minutes of trying to like the speaker, I had to give up. Mainly, I could not stand the "hard" unnatural sound despite being driven by Spectral and Boulder electronics. In contrast, the Rockport Altair was the antithesis of the Model 6, very enjoyable and natural sounding to these ears. The Magico house sound so far is just not my cup of tea. Hopefully, this will change with the Q series.

I love the Altair(obviosly)! But the magico are a great speaker, just differant. At the time they were my second choice(still would be). I felt the rockport gave the bigger bang for the buck, literally. They are very amp dependent. They need lots and lots of power.

I believe that Michael Fremer will be reviewing the Q5 for Stereophile, so there should be measurements and someone other than JV of TAS with a mainstream review in print.

I own the Mini 2 and have heard the M5 and Q5 at dealerships. The Mini 2 sounded fine at two dealers and bad at another but it really became musical in my own system after a lot of fine tuning. The M5 sounded very good in a short demo and the Q5 sounded good with some material and not so good with other music. I find it very difficult to form any real opinion in short dealer demos. Impressions yes, but impressions are just that and often subject to change .

The best dealer demo I have ever heard was of the Magico V2 with SME and Spectral and MIT. Everything was extremely well dialed in and well matched. Very memorable indeed.