72 August2019nstereophile.com
MAGNEPAN LRS
ASSOCIATED EQUIPMENT
measurements, continuedthat voice as if it were a crystal or a coin. The LRS took me
inside the recording venue; every trim pot and fader-setting
was there to be noticed.
As Fats sang, I realized that the KEF LS50 and the Mag-
nepan LRS were showing me two distinctly different views
of rock’n’roll recordings. The punchy, deep-voiced KEF was
playing fit, well-drawn, mesomorphic rock. The KEF’s rock
had impact. It inspired action. The LRS version of Fats was
more ectomorphic. More detached. Instead of head-bopping
and foot-stomping (like the LS50), the Magnepan LRS
wove complex webs of high-resolution audiophile sound. It
directed me to study how the recording was executed. The
LRS employed its extraordinary transparency toward the
causes of intimacy, tactility, and reflection. Canine vs feline.
For me, the most important difference between these
speakers came down to this: Because the KEF LS50 imparts
a slight opacity to everything it plays, it makes recordings
sound more similar than they actually are. Not surpris-
ingly, the Magnepan’s extreme transparency achieved the
opposite: It directed my attention toward how different
recordings sounded. The LRS let more of a recording’s true
sound come through. In this singular regard, the LRS almost
equaled my favorite “chameleon” speaker, the $2195/pair
Harbeth P3ESR.
“Horses for courses,” they say—and by that measure, Mag-
nepan’s LRS is not the horse I’d want to ride into The Dark
Side of the Moon or Led Zeppelin II fantasies. Meanwhile...Compared to the Magnepan .7
Pianos are giant percussion instruments, with enormous
wooden soundboards that amplify the vibrations of theirversion, 44.1/16 FLAC, Chess/Tidal), and I freaked!
I left my home in Norfolk Virginia
California on my mind
I straddled that Greyhound
And rode him into Raleigh and on across Caroline
I woke up high over Albuquerque
On a jet to the promised land
When the song ended, I was speechless. I could not
imagine a million-dollar system playing it any better. Like a
child, I played “Promised Land”—America’s greatest poem
by America’s most original poet—over and over, each time
louder than the last. Suddenly I wondered: Could the new
Maggies play Chuck—loud and with attitude?
Sure as you’re born, they bought me a silk suit
Put luggage in my hands
The Little Ribbon Speaker played Chuck loud enough for
me (88dB average/96dB peak, C-weighted). And Chuck’s
Chess-era “rock-it” attitude was definitely getting through.
But every cell in my body cried out for more wallop and
stronger bass.
This is when I realized that most rockers would want to
use a subwoofer (or two): not big ones, just ones that play
hard, tight, and fast. However! When the Tidal bot led me
to a fine-sounding remastered version of rock-progenitor
Fats Domino singing “I Want to Walk You Home” (from
Fats Domino Jukebox: 20 Greatest Hits, 41.1/16 F LAC E M I /
Tidal), I forgot all about subwoofers and wallop. Fats’ voice
(which I deeply love) never before sounded this pure and
close-to-the-mike present: I could observe the sound of
response measurements—try having
the tweeter ribbons 1" farther from
the microphone (at 50") than the
bass-mid cluster.” His cryptic recom-
mendation implied that the presence-
region suckout fills in to the side of the
tweeter section of the panel—and if
you look at the LRS’s horizontal disper-
sion (fig.3), that does appear to be the
case. The cursor in this graph is posi-
tioned at 3.1kHz, the center frequency
of the suckout, and as the individual
traces are normalized to the tweeter-
axis response, you can see that Herb
was correct.
The changes in response on the
woofer side of the panel, shown at the
front of fig.3, suggest that the listener
will get more midrange energy if the
speakers are positioned with their
tweeter sections on the outside edges.
The dipolar behavior in the midrange
is evident, though the dispersion in
the treble is more complicated. In the
vertical plane (fig.4), the suckout at
3.1kHz tends to fill in above and below
the midpanel axis.
In the time domain, the LRS’s stepresponse on the midpanel tweeter
axis (fig.5) reveals that the panel’s
high- and low-frequency sections are
connected in positive acoustic polarity.
The tweeter step slightly leads that
of the woofer on this axis, which sug-
gests that the best blend of the two
sections—one that gives a perfect,
right-triangle–shaped, time-coincident
step—occurs on the woofer side of
the measurement axis. Again, Herb’s
suggestion was correct. Some small
high-frequency ripples overlaying the
decay of the Magnepan’s step giverise to some top-octave hash in the
speaker’s cumulative spectral-decay
plot (fig.6)—but see, in footnote 2, the
link to my measurements of Magne-
pan’s MG2.6/R for an explanation of
why this behavior might not matter.
Interpreting the measured perfor-
mance of a panel loudspeaker such as
the Magnepan LRS is far from straight-
forward. Overall, however, the LRS
appears to be capable of well-balanced
sound, provided its owner takes care in
optimizing such matters as placement
and toe-in.—John AtkinsonFig.5 Magnepan LRS, step response on midpanel
tweeter axis at 50" (5ms time window, 30kHz
bandwidth).Fig.6 Magnepan LRS, cumulative spectral-decay
plot on midpanel tweeter axis at 50" (0.15ms
risetime).Time in msData in Volts