OK, I'm going to give you some slightly impressions of Saturdays demo of the Magico Q7/Spectral/MIT system at Overture.
First of all, Terry (and his staff) did a top notch job with the presentation and were extremely gracious hosts. As Marty intimated, Terry has been in the business now for probably over 20 years and that speaks tons as far as customer satisfaction. Terry carefully selects all the gear that his store represents and then goes the extra mile to make sure customers are happy with their purchase (being in Delaware doesn't hurt either when it comes to customer satisfaction!). Terry pointed out, that it doesn't help his customers for him to rep companies that will go out of business in a couple of years and leave the consumer with essentially a boat anchor. To that point, Overture has represented lines like Avalon, Spectral, Magnepan, MIT for many, many years. In fact, Terry installs every Spectral component in his customers homes (especially when it comes to grounding), making sure that these somewhat touchy electronics work perfectly.
Now, I've never particularly been a Spectral fan, finding their older gear somewhat representative of what was once described as the "CA sound." Very analytical and cold, at times verging on icy. Magico, I've heard mostly at shows with the the exception of the Q1s that I heard at Ears Nova in NYC. So far, I remain unimpressed; but one has to be acutely aware that having one day to set up a 175K speaker in a room that was never meant for sound, much less delivering any amount of current, is pure insanity.
So it's with that in mind that I went down to hear this circa 300K system at Terry's store. If there was anyone I knew (and I don't know Goodwins that Peter frequents), it was Terry who would get these beasts humming along in unison. So how did the system sound? Well first of all, I think that Terry was successful in meeting his primary objectives with this combo: The system was very quiet eg. low noise, effortless and pretty darn neutral. Did it move me? That's another story.
And there are many other issues that I'll briefly address as how does one ascribe culpability to any one component (or even the room) in the systme when they are completely unfamiliar with any of the components? Also, I don't think this room is the Magicos final resting place;Terry was expecting to have his new high-end room finished in time but the room the room wasn't ready in time due to unforeseen construction problems, .
I too was slightly disappointed that Terry didn't play any vinyl. I don't know if that was because he was expecting to have the new Basis tonearm and the table was awaiting that piece. As far as the music goes, Ken pretty much described the software of which a couple of tunes were taken from RR recordings (the new McLeod as well as the Rutter Requiem), a couple of selections from Terry's friend who owns Turtle Records in Holland and then some other assorted music such as the Lyle Lovett that Ken mentioned.
So not knowing any of the components, I thought the system's strengths were clean and detailed bass, nice soundstaging, good ambience retrieval and excellent low level resolution. On the other side of the coin, I was puzzled especially but the system's portrayal of the recording venue. Pretty much every recording sounded the same. Moreso, there was good ambience retrieval (perhaps it was added to the recording???) but little or no sense of the room the musicians were playing in. Also, I thought that instruments weren't as 3D as I would have liked them. I just always wanted to hear some more instrumental body to even solo artists like Doug Mcleod. Perhaps some further tuning of the MIT cables might have brought some better focus to the instruments as well as bit more midrange.
Like Ken I heard the hardness he spoke of but I don't know if that was the gear of simply the digital process (that's why I would have liked to hear the Basis table). I also felt that the while the system wasn't cold, it was a bit on the dry sound. More to the point, it again comes down whether one likes the sound of tubes vs. transistors. Tubes will give you more instrumental harmonics while ss gives you more of the instrument's initial fundamental.
So in summary, I'd say the system is still a work in progress. As with any great, high resolution, state-of-the-art speaker, it's only as good as the upstream components. Perhaps with a little more tweaking or a different room, the Magico system will meet its rather lofty expectations.
