ITALIAN VERSION

Tim (Greybeard), Eric (Atma-Sphere), David (Magnan), Catherine & Keith (Greybeard)

An impressive overview of hi-end word:David Magnan answers to our questions. DAVID MAGNAN: I AM STILL an AUDIOPHILE ! Audio and the enjoyment of mainly classical music is one of my most time consuming and rewarding pursuits

I guess I had better be brief here, since this is my favorite subject. By profession I am an electronics engineer and software designer. I work for the U.S. Navy on fighter aircraft radar, weapons, navigation and display digital systems. I am married and live near Los Angeles. I have a wide range of interests and enthusiasms, including biology, archaeology, art (oil painting), metaphysics and spirituality, and last but not least audio. Of course, audio and the enjoyment of mainly classical music is one of my most time consuming and rewarding pursuits. I seem to be fairly unusual in my experience in combining (to use the common metaphor) "left brain" and "right brain" abilities - a strong scientific and technical side along with great appreciation of music and art, and a certain creativity. Naturally, these words don't really describe "who" I am from a personality and history standpoint, but should suffice for this interview, which is, after all, primarily about my designs products and business.

The same way many other audio hobbyists have gotten started - through designing my own cables and electronics after becoming dissatisfied with the current "state-of-the-art". In those days, 15 years or so ago, I started selling a few cables to audiophiles who found out about my designs by word of mouth. One thing led to another, and this grew into a real business, helped by several audiophile friends already in the retail and manufacturing areas.

This is complicated but the primary reason is common to many small high end audio companies. To become a "mover and shaker" or for that matter even to be noticed much in the high end market has mainly been a matter of having sufficient capital and influential business and magazine contacts, and then exploiting them at the right time (mainly luck) with a lot of advertising and an aggressive marketing effort with the dealers. The quality of the products has little to do with this. With most small companies including myself, this combination of factors never comes about. Another major reason for obscurity is the very crowded nature of the high end cable market. In the US, there are innumerable small cable manufacturers, and more every year, with the designers all claiming to have the only true or ultimate design approach. Consumer audiophiles inevitably become confused and apathetic.

My cables are intended only for the high end audio market and so far I have found no other application of the technology. Prospective purchasers tend to be those audiophiles who can appreciate musically natural, time-coherent sound, and who primarily enjoy classical and jazz. Audiophiles who listen mainly to highly processed and artificial pop and rock music, and those who use their cables as passive equalizers tend not to be too interested in my products. These factors are another of the reasons for my obscurity in the US high end market. Unfortunately, in the US at least my "prospective purchasers" as sketched above are a shrinking and aging segment of the population.

This can't be quantified in any simple percentage way because of differences between listeners and the great variation in quality, especially time coherence, of individual components - speakers, amplifiers, etc., and the previously used brand of cables. The magnitude of the effect due to installation of any of the Magnan cables is especially dependent on the existing overall resolution of the system and the ranking between cable types - speaker, interconnect, etc., is very subjective and listener dependent. The best general statement would be that in a good system and with an experienced listener, the effect of any of the Magnan cables is a dramatic transformation of the sound in the direction of much more resolution combined with musical naturalness. The apparent percentage change is a very individual determination.

I have never produced a cable designed specifically for analog as opposed to digital (CD) systems. Although the Silver Bronze I believe gets info the same "ballpark" sonically as the Signature to my knowledge, only the Signature conductive polymer technology can achieve its special capabilities. If I knew how to make an interconnect cable with the sonic qualities of the Signature and the low resistance and physical compactness of the Silver Bronze, I would certainly be making it.

Your question implies a realistic appreciation of the demands and usual personal costs of being in business even as a manufacturer much less as a retailer. I am still an audiophile primarily because this pursuit is a part of me, a labor of love and obsession too fascinating and rewarding to give up. I have managed this by deliberately keeping the business side of my life separate and limited, and in not depending on it for all my income. Life consists in part of a series of compromises and tradeoffs and given many factors also including the limited market for any products I am comfortable with my particular approach to the business area in my life.

Certainly most of my customers are serious audiophiles and would have to be to appreciate the special sound, exotic design and construction of my cables, and to understand and accept the pricing range necessitated by hand-made, labor-intensive manufacture, expensive materials, etc.

My role as a small manufacturer in a limited "niche" market has not changed, except as the market has become much more crowded and competing for a shrinking customer base drifting away into newer entertainment technologies and interests such as home theater-video and computers.

I very much like vacuum tube sound at its best. My previous system used output transformerless (OTL) tube amps and highly modified stacked Quad 57 electrostats. My current view is that it is a difficult tradeoff between the best tube amplifiers, for instance, and the best solid-state units. With current technology neither is quite right, with the choice boiling down to personal preferences in excellence between "sweetness", "musicality", low noise level, time resolution, low distortion, speed and immediacy, dynamics, and many other factors. These tradeoffs are also complicated by the great sensitivity, especially of solid-state components to vibrational damping, AC power filtering and other system modifications which can greatly improve performance.

I have been extremely impressed by a few single-ended triode (SET) amp high efficiency horn systems. In particular, I think the Edgarhorn (using new technology drivers) is outstanding when driven by a good 300B or 2A3 SET amp. The best of these systems can have a wonderful sense of immediacy, purity and dynamics. Unfortunately, many of the horn systems I have heard have a lot of problems with the driver(s) and with horn structure resonances and coloration. In other words, I think many of the SET amps are outstanding but there are few really good, very high efficiency speakers able to be adequately driven by the low power SET amps of 2-10 watts. I prefer the 2A3 to the 300B as an output tube and am presently using a Moth 2-watt 2A3 stereo SET amp to drive my superb Ergo Heil driver headphones. This particular 2A3 amp uses DC on the filaments in order to keep hum very low for driving headphones.

In my view, extreme extension into the subsonic bass and ultrasonic high frequency regions is much less important than a speakers' time response - that is, the coherence of its impulse response. "Wide-band" performance is also much less important than having very little boxy, wooden, resonant coloration, and not squashing the dynamics of the music. In my opinion, speaker design should concentrate on those core performance areas if accurate, natural sound reproduction is the goal. Of course, loudspeaker design is a vastly complex field and these remarks only touch on all the factors and tradeoffs involved.

Certainly not, if by the term "general public" is meant everyone, not just audiophiles. Only audiophiles and to some extent videophiles can appreciate the special qualities of high-end audio components in general, much less my cables.

I have not had enough experience yet with these new high-end audio formats to make a definitive judgment, but it seems that both can deliver somewhat more natural and less irritating sound than "stock" 16/44 kHz CDs. However, so much has been learned about optimizing and tweaking 16/44 CD playback that the very best conventional CD front end systems squeeze out close to 16/44 specification performance and rival the new formats where the comparison is with unmodified, untweaked 24/96 and SACD players.

Both of the techniques drastically improve 16/44 CD playback and comprise a key portion of the 16/44 CD optimizations referred to in the last answer.

Certainly so-not just a danger but currently actually undermining the high-end market. This process would seem to be inevitable and unstoppable. However, since changes in technology and in general appreciation of various art forms is also inevitable. We can also expect, though, there will always be a "core" high-end audiophile market. Unfortunately, reduced in size and unable to support a great number of specialized manufacturers.

Referring to my audio cable business, a major satisfaction is in simply knowing that my cables are uniquely enhancing the enjoyment of reproduced music with audiophiles all over the world.

At the top of my list is the old Quad 57 ELS. My system used highly modified stacked old Quads and subwoofers for many years. Second would be the Audio Research D150 stereo tube amp. Another component that specially comes to mind is the Toshiba optical phono cartridge. I had one modified by Van Den Hul and it was magical though frustratingly prone to noise when not perfectly set up.

My remarks in answer to several of the previous questions relate to this. It is wonderful that so much creativity and inventiveness is being devoted to this technology. Unfortunately, it is also clear that the market for dedicated high-end audio is somewhat declining and making a good profit with a new enterprise is getting more and more difficult.

The most basic "special something" is simply that most, but not all, high-end audio products have been designed to elicit the beauty and power of live musical performances in the home. Whether of great or mediocre quality, commercially successful or not, I believe this is basically a noble pursuit and diametrically opposed to many negative trends in society.

ITALIAN VERSION