Motion Gen4 at MartinLogan

In what it has described as “an ambitious ground-up development process”, MartinLogan has released not one but two series of new speakers — a ‘Motion’ series, and a premium ‘Motion XT’. These are the fourth generation of the original 2010 Motion series, which brought to MartinLogan a more conventional room-friendly alternative to the company’s legendary but large electrostatic speakers.

The Motion name comes from the use of ‘Folded Motion’ tweeters (FMT), a variant of the type originally patented by pioneer Oskar Heil as an ‘air motion transformer’ or ‘AMT’. These use a low-mass thin film diaphragm folded into an accordion shape and placed in a constant symmetrical magnetic field; the alternating music signal then causes the diaphragm to fold in and out to deliver its sound. This ‘squeezing out’ of the sound is highly efficient, while the folded accordion enormously enlarges the available surface area over a dome tweeter. The two speaker ranges have two different new versions of the FMT. The lower Motion Series gets a Gen2 Obsidian Folded Motion tweeter, while the premium series has the highest-performance ‘XT’ variant yet, which increases the diaphragm area by 40% over the previous top tweeter. The midrange cone materials are also new: Nomex-reinforced Kevlar cones for the Motion XT series, woven fibreglass for the Motion series, while all models retain aluminium woofers for the bass section. The full two-series range is shown above in the Walnut finish, though the Satin White versions look thrillingly modern, and there’s a Gloss Black option too. Each range includes two floorstander models, a standmount and a centre speaker, so providing everything for home cinema use. The Motion Series adds the interesting MP10, a versatile shallow model that can wallmount either parallel to a wall surface or flipped and mounted to angle down into the room. More information on all this Motion from www.audioactive.com.au