To Doug Schneider,

I enjoyed your review of the Magico V2. I haven't heard them yet, and I'm considering buying a pair. I did hear the Magico S1 at CES last week, and loved it. Imaging was stunning, coherence up and down the frequency range was seemingly perfect, and bass was impressive and detailed. All this from a speaker with just a tweeter and one 7” driver. Incredible. On the other hand, they were driven by "to-die-for" amplification from Constellation Audio, and all music was 100% new to me and exceptionally well-recorded, so I'm not sure my impressions would be repeated at home.

So I thought I would ask you if you had heard the S1s too. If so, any general impressions or comparisons with the V2? Based on size and number of drivers, I would guess an easy answer might be, "the S1 has less bass," but, frankly, I didn't hear any deficiency in that department, and both are rated down to 32hz, so I don't know what to think!

Thanks,
Andy Tebbe

I did hear the S1 last week at CES, and my initial impression is that the speaker is better than the V2 overall, but I’m only going to say so much right now for a couple of reasons. One has to do with an article that I’m writing that will be published in the “Opinion” section on February 1 -- the S1 is mentioned in there, so I don’t want to take anything away from that. The other has to do with the tentative scheduling of a review of that speaker. Magico’s Alon Wolf indicated that he’s willing to ship the S1 to us for a review and measurements quite soon, the latter being quite telling, particularly when it comes to bass response, because most other publications don’t have the proper facility at their disposal to do speaker measurements like we do. So, for right now, that’s really all that I can say, which I hope you understand. But stay tuned to see what transpires with the S1 -- and maybe even the larger S5! . . . Doug Schneider