Affordable Nirvana

IMAGINE THAT

Ferrari introduced a new mid-engine sports car that sold for only $30,000. Sounds like a killer deal, but would you jump at the opportunity? The answer to that question will probably depend on your life situation. For a single person who just wants to head out and have fun, then maybe. But if you have kids who need rides to school and soccer practice, probably not.

The Magnepan LRS (Little Ribbon Speaker) is a new model from one of the world’s premier speaker brands— one that sells for an almost absurdly low price. The catch here is that the LRS won’t work well in every setup and will only be a good match for certain types of listeners. More than just about any other speaker I can think of, it demands that you play matchmaker and carefully run through a personal checklist of qualities you want from a speaker. And if your priorities happen to match with the speaker’s strengths, you could be headed for a level of musical nirvana way beyond what its price tag would suggest.

As one of the keystone brands of the U.S. high-end audio industry, Magnepan has been building speakers in White Bear Lake, Minnesota since it was founded by Jim Winey over 50 years ago. In the decades since then, Magnepan has remained about as doggedly a conservative company as you’ll find, with the same factory and ownership for all that time, and unlike so many other iconic audio brands, there has never been even a hint that it would suddenly head off to China seeking cheaper production costs. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has had the same coffee machine in the break room since the 1970s. More important, apart from a brief flirtation with a tonearm 40 years ago, Magnepan has made only dipole panel speakers for its entire history.

Magnepan’s Magneplanar speakers use what’s known as planar magnetic technology, and while their tall and skinny panels may bear a physical resemblance to electrostatic speakers such as those from Quad and Martinlogan, the operating principles are quite different. In some ways, a planar magnetic driver is actually more closely related to traditional cone woofers and dome tweeters than an electrostatic panel that gets

The 14.5-inchwide, 45-inch-tall LRS is the most living roomfriendly Magnepan speaker offering. plugged into the wall. They are physically similar, however, in that both types use a flat, lightweight membrane that’s driven over its entire surface area, a design that eliminates the requirement of having to balance low mass and stiffness that comes with a cone or dome driver.

Magnepan has used three variations of the planar magnetic driver over its history. The LRS uses what it calls quasi-ribbon drivers, where a serpentine aluminum ribbon is bonded to a thin Mylar sheet that’s stretched tight by the speaker’s frame. This diaphragm sits immediately in front of a perforated metal plate covered with an array of magnets, so when a signal with fluctuating polarity is passed through the ribbon, it will be attracted to and repelled by the magnets, causing the panel to vibrate and move air. Despite being a two-way speaker, both the woofer and tweeter sections in the LRS reside on the same piece of Mylar membrane, with the skinnier tweeter section running vertically along one side. By keeping the tweeter section narrow, the speaker can deliver good horizontal dispersion over a wide seating area, while its 37-inch height keeps vertical dispersion tightly controlled to minimize floor and ceiling interactions.

Magnepan has offered a lower-cost entry level speaker for decades, but it has decided to target a somewhat different type of customer with this latest offering. Previous entry level Maggies like the MMGI were specifically designed to be less demanding to drive than a typical Magneplanar speaker, so customers could put together an affordable system using

a simple receiver or amplifier. The LRS, in contrast, makes none of those compromises and instead represents a physical scaling-down of the full-blown Magneplanar experience. Longtime Magnepan marketing boss Wendell

Diller describes the LRS as an appetizer for the line, one that’s designed to suck you in with its low cost, but then entice you to move further up the Magnepan food chain.

The LRS speaker is a 48-inch-tall, 14.5-inch-wide fabric- covered panel that’s just over one-inch deep. A very thin strip of wood in cherry, light oak, or black oak runs up each side to provide a visual accent to the monolithic panel, while the fabric can be ordered in off-white, gray, or black. A plate near the panel’s rear side base holds speaker terminals that accept 4mm banana plugs or bare wire secured with a set screw, and Magnepan offers an optional spade lug adapter to accommodate spade connectors. It also has a socket to install a resistor that lowers the tweeter level slightly, with two values of resistor provided. I was happy with the speaker’s sonic balance in the standard setting with no resistors installed, so didn’t experiment further, but these may be useful for a reflective, bright-sounding room. The two L-shaped legs give the speaker a backward lean to make it more stable, while folding flaps at the end of each leg provide some tilt adjustment. (More on that later.)

Magnepan mostly sells the LRS through its network of brick-and-mortar dealers, but will also sell directly to U.S. customers that don’t have a nearby dealer, with a 60-day full refund policy.

SETUP

As with any open-baffle dipole speaker, the positive-polarity sound the LRS puts out into the room is matched by an equal amount of reverse-polarity sound firing to the rear, so positioning is critical. These speakers really need room to breath, and I found they worked best when placed a full three to six feet out from my room’s front wall. Adjusting their angle relative to the listening position is also important; this acts like a highfrequency tone control while also letting you dial in sonic focus similar to the lens on a camera. Magnepan says you can experiment with arranging the tweeters on either the inside or outside, with results depending on the size of the room. I found I could achieve greater depth and dimensionality in my 14- by 16-foot space with the tweeters on the inside. Magnepan also suggests adjusting toe-in so that the tweeters sit about an inch further away from a listener’s ears than the woofers. This turned out to be good advice and delivered a better blend between the woofer and tweeter, plus a smoother overall balance. The speaker’s vertical dispersion is optimized for a seated listener, with a little metal hoop on the back of each L-shaped foot allowing you to make a fairly crude adjustment of the backward tilt. Given my low-ish seating position, this turned out to be a handy adjustment, although I would have appreciated the ability to get the LRS pair sitting even a little more upright.

With so much space out from the walls needed to optimize performance, a common complaint will likely be that the LRS is simply too physically dominant in the room.

But there’s actually a simple fix for that problem. At around 20 pounds each including the legs and no spikes or other floor-coupling devices, these

shows that Magnepan wasn’t kidding when it said the LRS wasn’t designed with compromises for budget systems in mind. Friends of mine have reported excellent results using affordable amps like the Schiit Audio Vidar and Rogue Audio Sphinx with the LRS, proving that you don’t need a system with a five-figure price tag to get excellent results. Interestingly, it seems that the critical factor is not how many watts an amp can deliver to the LRS, but how well it delivers current into a low-impedance load (the LRS has a specified impedance of 4 ohms).

With any speaker having limited bass extension and bass power, there’s always temptation to saddle it with a subwoofer. I did try the LRS with an SVS SB-2000 Pro sub, which did a good job blending with the lightning-fast panel, but this review is ultimately about the LRS without add-ons.

PERFORMANCE

Scrolling through Qobuz to find some tasty tunes to stream, I settled on the famous 1961 live Bill Evans Trio recording from the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York City. Right out of the gate I heard many similar qualities between the Magnepans and the Quad ESL-57 speakers I use every day, with the LRS delivering high levels of transparency and coherency. The volume of air in this tiny club— one I’m familiar with—was instantly recognizable, with every murmur from the audience or clink of glasses on the bar plainly audible. The sound of Evans’ piano had the percussive attack of the real thing, while Paul Motian’s cymbals sizzled. But the real star of this recording is young bassist Scott Lafaro, whose blazing virtuosity was cut short by a car accident just days later. Lafaro’s fingering and speed were startlingly clear through the LRS, and while the panel didn’t deliver the deep thunder of his instrument, I didn’t really feel like I was being short-changed.

For a complete change of pace, I next played a 1973 recording of Vivaldi’s flute concerto La Notte, performed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt with his chamber orchestra. This extraordinary recording has the orchestra sitting in the middle of a very live-sounding church, but through the LRS the direct sound of the instruments blended perfectly with the acoustics of the space in a way

that made me feel I was right there. The tonality of the original instruments came across in bold, bright colors, from the bite of the bassoon to the woodiness of the period-style flute.

To ramp things up a bit, I streamed the title track from Janis Ian’s Breaking Silence album via Tidal and immediately heard that famous bass impact

I’m familiar with from other Magnepan speakers. While it may not have the ability to deliver deep, sustained low bass, the LRS certainly did a fine job delivering the leading edge and impact of the bass notes. I first noticed what I call “Maggie Bass” almost 40 years ago when I was listening to a friend’s MG-IIIS and noticed how his otherwise relaxed cat would flip its head around to look at the speaker each time the drummer thumped his kick drum. I’m happy to say that effect carries over to the little LRS. Besides the bass quality, the clarity of the acoustic guitar and Janis’ almost whispered vocals were pretty extraordinary for a speaker at this price.

CONCLUSION

They say that with high demands come great rewards, and that certainly holds true with the Magnepan LRS. While it’s not exactly an “all-rounder” speaker, the LRS does make for a compelling gateway drug to the world of highperformance audio. The better you feed it, the better it gives back, so perhaps Wendell was right in characterizing the LRS as an appetizer for the Magneplanar line. But then again, I’ve been to restaurants where the appetizers were so good that I wanted more of those rather than moving on to a main course. After the meal, you can always drive home in your $30,000 Ferrari.