Enclosures
Resonances in the body of a musical instrument are an essential part of defining its nature and quality. The opposite is true of a loudspeaker.
Cabinet panel resonances are a significant cause of sound coloration. Heavy bracing of a typical MDF enclosure can help reduce enclosure flex but at the cost of increased energy storage and damping factor. Although a welcome attribute for midrange outout, over damping is detrimental to bass performance (high energy storage, low wide Q and low resonances).
MAGICO has spent many years developing an enclosure system that successfully balances the 3 elements that constitute a proper loudspeaker enclosure: stiffness, mass, and internal damping.
The graphs here show the spectral decay data across the range of typical enclosure construction methods.
No singular material can satisfy all of the properties desirable in a loudspeaker enclosure.
As stiffness increases, moving from MDF to phenolic resin to aluminum, cabinet vibrations are drastically reduced, although a sharpened Q of the resonance results in an audible ring.
By damping the high Q resonance via elaborate constrained layer damping we have eliminated all energy storage and audible resonance from our enclosure.
MAGICO has pioneered the use of aluminum in loudspeakers design. We built our first aluminum enclosure back in 1994 and have never looked back. Extremely stiff yet easy to damp, a properly designed aluminum enclosure is the ideal platform for high-performance loudspeakers. So inert, the enclosures have no discernible coloration of their own-allowing the drivers to operate with the utmost clarity and dynamics. Though costly to implement, the use of aluminum in our enclosures plays a vital role in our design philosophy.
The chassis: Like any modern mechanical device, its effectiveness is determined by the ability of its moving parts to travel efficiently.
The new Q series is designed with the same principles applied to automobile or airplane construction.
Intricate internal framework makes up an extremely rigid chassis to which all of the mechanical, passive and active parts are mounted to maximize the efficiency of each component.
The end result is the most well adapted loudspeaker enclosure ever built.