Doug Schroeder reports on the sound of flat & round cables from Magnan Cables
September, 2007
MSRP: Signature Speaker Cables, 8ft: $1,090 Reference Speaker Cables, 8ft: $705 Digital Interconnect, 6ft (standard length): $825 Type Vi Interconnect, 4ft: RCA $620, XLR $720 Signature Power Cable, standard length 8ft: $700
Magnan Cables, Inc. 355 N. Lantana, #576 Camarillo, CA 93010-6038 Tel. (805) 484-9544
Email: magnaninfo0340@aol.com
INTRODUCTION Would you pay good money for a speaker cable that imparts almost no sonic signature of its own? In other words, would you pay more to obtain seemingly less if it allowed you to enjoy the music more? You might answer, “That all depends…” Indeed, as I assessed the value and sound character of Magnan Cables, my judgment of them depended upon whether excellent sound could be achieved with a design goal emphasizing ultra- diminutive conductors. Welcome to the “flat” world of Magnan Audio Cables. No, not Magnepan, but Magnan, named after David Magnan, an electronics engineer and programmer who has spent time as a civilian working for the Navy on projects, such as digital fire control and avionics for aircraft like the F-14 Tomcat. As an avid fan of classical music and Jazz, David has thrusted himself into the rarified air of audiophile cable design. The result has been a flat – no, I mean flat as in micro-thin flat – cable designed to counter “skin effect” and time smearing. Having tested numerous conventional cable designs, all without satisfaction, David began flattening and thinning the conductor as a way to reduce skin effect. Just what is skin effect? According to David, it is essentially a change in the electric field around the conductor which causes the signal current corresponding to a sound to be “stretched out in time”. As the high frequencies arrive earlier than the lower frequencies, a phenomenon called “time smearing” occur. David states that it results in, “blurring and flattening of soundstage, smearing together of instrumental images, muddiness…and usually a general overbrightness.”
DETAILS OF FLATNESS
Magnan’s claim to fame is reduction of “skin effect.” I’ve seen a few women whose makeup is so thick they could use a bit of skin effect, as in scraping off enough goop to actually see skin! In a technological breakthrough for makeup, Bare Essentials sells powdered rock which is applied in a very thin layer. The results certainly are fabulous on my lovely wife Connie’s face! There is no “goop layer” to mess up her looks, only the super thin coloration which allows her skin to be seen as mildly tinted, a very nice result. I never dreamed I’d be discussing makeup in a cable review. In similar fashion, David seems to be removing the “goop layer” of time smear by not giving the conductor enough room for it to be caked onto the signal. In order to achieve this, David had to reduce the gauge of the conductor radically. According to David, it results in “a sort of sonic rightness and clarity with outstanding transparency and coherence of sonic image without any HF edge.” As stated early on, the conductors are intentionally reduced as much as possible. Hidden behind lovely silver and black woven braided nylon jackets, shockingly thin copper highways lay embedded in an air space/TFE Teflon dielectric. (Note that different models employ different conductors, including bronze and a silver/bronze combination; see the website for details). How thin are we talking? Before I answer, allow me to share David’s answer to the question I posed regarding the gauge of the cables: If a primary goal is the reduction of skin effect, couldn’t a person take multiple, very small gauge wires and create a woven cable with low skin effect? After all, if the goal is smaller gauge, then why not make something akin to the CAT-5 DIY cables which some have suggested are so good? I should have known, David had a very good answer. He had already conducted tests with thin – I mean vanishingly thin wires (are you detecting a pattern here?) – in order to achieve significant reduction in skin effect. He had to make them so small that they were impossibly delicate. How, then, could he achieve his goal in making skin effect go away without making the conductor go away? By putting lots of micro-thin conductors really close together, in other words a super thin sheet. The result is an extremely flat but wide cable. How thin are the conductive sheets? In the Signature speaker cable, which is 5” wide, the actual conductor is .00075” thick! That’s 7.5/10,000 thick, or shall I say thin? The Type VI interconnect is a coaxial design with .0005” (by the way, this is much thinner than a human hair) bronze conductor in an 80% air and 20% Teflon dielectric. A person doesn’t need a blowtorch to cut through these wires. I wonder how many could be stacked and still cut with a scissors? Maybe I’ll ask Dave on a successive review.
NOT THAT FLAT
It wasn’t difficult to come up with the question, “Will I destroy one of these if I step on it?” After all, I’ve put my foot through things a lot thicker than .0005” of metal! What good is a cable if one fold or one misstep is disaster? David reassured me that they are quite durable and a step on them will not harm them. I confirmed this with my own experience, since I accidentally stepped on one while hooking them up. It kept working, so I bent it over and began jumping on it. NO, just kidding! But, the Signature speaker cables arrived neatly folded, complete with creases in them. They stretched out nicely, and the nylon outer jacket bounced back to normal form quickly. From my experience, conscientious handling of them will not harm them. I did not have to be too concerned in handling them, however one should take care not to snag the somewhat loose nylon woven jacket lest a pull occurs. Working the pull with fingers can shrink it back into the weave. Just how does one get an ultra thin 5” wide sheet to merge with a single-ended connector? Very carefully! Although that construction method remains a secret, one sees each Signature speaker conductor (all four are separate cables; two positive and two negative cables constitute one pair) at its end has an appropriately flat, triangular shaped reducing collar to shunt the body of the conductor toward a more conventional looking lead. Terminations are typically rhodium-plated spade or banana. There are so many things in audio which, at first blush, seem counter-intuitive, yet work. One is polishing CD’s. I do not consider it to be a tweak, since it is needed only once and the results are permanent, even more so than cleaning an album. Intuitively, one would think that no sonic benefit would result from polishing a CD, yet one would be seriously wrong (Whether one prefers the result is completely an individual decision). I thoroughly enjoy taking a visitor’s untreated disc, setting a listening baseline, then treating it and replaying. The last time I did so, my acquaintance exclaimed, “WOW,” on the order of six times. What seems unlikely can rapidly become unimaginable to live without. He proceeded to polish his entire collection of discs – some 1,000 plus of them.
QUICKLY: FAT FLAT, “PHAT” “… remember, we’re dealing with electron flow in cables, not water flow …” So it is with extremely flat cables. Intuitively one would think that a round “pipeline” construction would most benefit the sound. After all, in many engineering applications round pipelines are the ideal. The mind naturally connects the image of a flattened cable with flat or restricted sound. But remember, we’re dealing with electron flow in cables, not water flow. In a garden hose, a flat cable isn’t too advantageous, but in copper conductors it’s no impediment at all. The ability of manufacturers to shape the conductor of a cable into whatever shape they desire can result in lovely sonic benefits. That is what I propose Magnan Cables to be, lovely flat things with a phat (That’s Pretty Hot And Tempting) sound. You’ve heard the term PRAT? Magnan cables are PHAT! I have been going on for some time about how flat Magnan cables are, but there is a surprise in store! Certain models are not just flat, but downright fat (No, not phat, normal fat)! Magnan cables are actually both flat and fat, two radically different looks from one manufacturer. The Reference speaker cable is not as extremely wide as the Signature; it has the same thinness of conductor at 1 ¼” wide, and has both leads stacked within a single silver nylon braided jacket. The Type Vi, Silver-Bronze interconnects and the Magnan Digital are the only conventional looking cables Magnan offers. Dave Magnan has a thing for skinny wires in his IC’s too, these being .0005” thick Type Vi arranged in a coaxial configuration. The diameter of both the RCA and XLR interconnects is approximately ½”.
The power cables can cause an audiophile to do a double-take. They are very generously proportioned along their midsection, but at the ends taper quickly at the last foot to a modest tool shop power cord diameter. One might wonder, “Why the pretense? Why have six feet of an eight foot cord be outrageously large with one foot of smaller cable on each end?” The conclusion I came to is that Magnan Cables are flattened and thinned to whatever extent possible. Being such radically different conductors, they must at some point be melded to conventional leads or else they would not work with components. I’m sure that in an ideal world, David would insist on hooking up the flat conductors directly to the component. So, he has settled for turning as much of the conductor as possible into his super thin sheets.
USING THE MAGNAN It should be noted that there are limits to the lengths of some of Magnan cable models. By using such minimalist conductors, longer runs of cable present signal conductor resistance or resistance of ground return problems. In other cases, to maintain proper sonics, cables are only available in minimum lengths of several feet. Do not let this fact deter you from consideration of these cables; these limitations are not global, and the performance is of a caliber that these idiosyncrasies are largely insignificant. Before ordering, study the websites’ FAQ link. With Magnan cables as much as any cable I have ever seen, form dictates function, and does so marvelously. For a cable that’s almost not there, I’m impressed with two things, how much an audiophile does get for their dollar, and how full the sound is. Regarding economics, these cables take a higher degree of labor to produce than average. As they are hand made, slight variances can exist between evenly matched pairs. On the pair of silver colored Reference speaker cables, the leads were slightly shorter, maybe .25” different in length. I was able to reach the outer, bridged binding posts of my Pathos Classic One MkII amps comfortably with one, but only snugly with the other. In most applications this is neglible, but I would check closely the distance between posts and ensure that the Magnan cables you order will reach. My hunch is that if you speak with Magnan regarding your needs, producing a slightly longer lead would be no problem.
I determined that the preponderance of change had to be due to the amps since the attenuation was changed so radically. This was confirmed when I discovered that the switch on the back of the Monarchy mono amps drops the level six dB if in the wrong position! No wonder the sound was so radically different! Once that was accounted for, I noted no dramatic difference in performance between the single-ended and balanced IC’s.
WITH THE EMINENT TECHNOLOGY LFT-8A My overall listening impressions started off with a bang, “Wow! Magnificently devoid of shrillness and full of the bouquet of music! One of best initial sounds in a cable I’ve ever heard.” The Magnan cables had the ability to transform the Eminent Technology LFT-8A speaker’s sound into a dynamic speaker-like blended experience, while still retaining the wide open panel sound, more so than any other cable I’ve used. It opened them up nicely and without the tissy top-end that can plague more revealing cables. For owners of Magneplanars and E.T.’s, these cables could be considered “planar cables.” They mated exceptionally well with the planar technology. Who would have thought – planar cables for planar speakers – a very pleasing match. “… the Magnan cables allowed the E.T.’s to more fully capture the timbre and depth of the body of the instrument which was missing previously.” One indicator that the Magnans were doing a superb job was the way in which any piano piece was presented so naturally. I will be frank and share that prior to this point, I had not heard the Eminent Technology speakers reproduce piano in an utterly natural way. The timbre was not correct, and there was not enough depth to it. I thought that this was largely a shortcoming of the magnetic planar design. I was wrong; the Magnan cables allowed the E.T.’s to more fully capture the timbre and depth of the body of the instrument which was missing previously. With the Magnan’s, electric guitar licks were luscious; I enjoyed Craig Caquiso’s Acoustic Planet and Daryl Sturmer’s Another Side of Genesis, among others. I have commented in other reviews on the ability of the MIT series of cables to “amplify” the signal without distortion. The Magnan cables have the ability to do just the opposite, to attenuate the treble without loss of detail – a remarkable feat that leads me to believe that Dave really is onto something in his quest to eliminate skin effect.
WITH THE B&W CM7 The controlled nature of the Magnan sound showed itself as I used a pair of B&W CM7 speakers (review in progress). These are smaller floor standers with 5” Kevlar mids and 1” metal dome tweeters. Sporting a 6” bass driver, they do not have a huge foundation to counter the strong tweeter. The CM7’s are superb at detail retrieval, but with cables that emphasize detail it can be too much. The MIT cables brought tremendous focus and energy, but I could not tolerate the hot top-end for long periods with these smaller speakers. The upper end of the CM7 is simply so revealing, so brisk, that it needed to be moderated. “These cables are so good at reorganizing a strong treble signal that I earnestly recommend trying them prior to dumping a speaker system due to dissatisfaction with the upper frequencies.” The Magnan cables were a good match for the B&W’s in that they reduced the hotness factor and kept the detail. I kept the MIT’s on the bass and the Magnan Signatures on the top-end. It was the sonic equivalent of driving the woofers with solid state amps and the high end with tubes. Remember what I just said, since I have found no combination of cables that has produced a similar effect to such a pleasing degree: MIT on bottom and Magnan on top are a wonderful pairing for speakers tilted toward the top end! These cables are so good at reorganizing a strong treble signal that I earnestly recommend trying them prior to dumping a speaker system due to dissatisfaction with the upper frequencies. I have come up with a name for the Magnan Cables – “Tweeter Tamers”. On the B&W CM7 speakers, the Magnan’s were a splendid match. Shoot, on virtually any speaker they were splendid! I had recently upgraded my projector in the HT/listening room and for quite a while had the CM7’s perform double duty as they are designed to, as 2 channel and HT speakers. One of my demo discs was Seal Live in Paris. I was not expecting a terribly moving experience since my subs were not implemented when the CM7’s were being reviewed. Nevertheless, the bass line was strong enough to be felt on the skin, if not the bowels. I had no trouble at all transporting myself to the venue; the Magnan cables kept the CM7’s from overdoing it even at higher levels.
WITH VON SCHWEIKERT VR4 SR MKII The results of pairing the Magnan cables with the Von Schweikert VR-4 SR MKII speakers was undeniable. These are a very smooth, completely non-fatiguing cable in the treble. Von Schweikert owners should seriously consider the Magnan’s as they mate exceptionally well. In this setup, since I was not in need to tame the treble, I used the Magnan cables on both the bass and upper end. It was a combination that was impervious to ear strain at high levels. I pulled out some older rock discs that I can only listen to at certain times – times when treble is very controlled. Chief among them is Simple Minds’ Good News from the Next World. The entire disc seems like it was recorded hot, tracks like “Night Music,” or “And the Band Played On” especially seem one iota from utter distortion. This is one of the most poorly recorded rock discs I have ever encountered. It takes quite a lot of work for equipment to keep the sound from degrading into electronic mush. “I encourage anyone who listens to music with potentially irritating treble or with an urge to listen with concert levels to audition the Magnans.” The Magnan cables are a surprisingly good “leash” between components, keeping the disc listenable on the Von Schweikerts. I encourage anyone who listens to music with potentially irritating treble or with an urge to listen with concert levels to audition the Magnans. One of their strong points is the ability to allow the feeling of getting the whole package sonically while removing the low end system sound that some recordings have.
SUMMARY In this review, I used one set of the Signature speaker cables and one set of the Reference cables. I was able to hear them in reversed positions on several speakers. The Reference cables captured maybe 75-80% of the openness and delicacy of the Signatures. There seemed to be a direct connection between the sheer width of the conductor and the resultant sound. On it’s own, the Reference stands as a superb value. Anyone considering cables for a serious rig would be pleased to have them. However, the Signatures were clearly cleaner, more erudite and extended in both frequency and sound stage. I found that I was constantly keeping the Signatures on the mid/high inputs on speakers. I wish I had been able to hear the Signatures on both inputs as it would have made for a phenomenal presentation, I believe. There are not many cables where $1k gets you an impeccable presentation; the Magnan Signature comes as close as I have heard. The Type Vi interconnects were also top notch performers. In a similar manner to the speaker cables, they attenuated the high frequencies, yet revealing a very pleasing, full sound. I found great success in using them between tube preamps and solid-state amps. I liked them as a link between the Rogue Perseus preamp and Monarchy SM70 amps, and on other occasions as jumper replacements for the Dussun V8i integrated amp. The single-ended terminations were a touch loose on the Dussun amp, but snug on most other components. A favorite among these delicacies was the Magnan Digital cable. It brought some terrific sound from my Rega Saturn, acting as transport, to both the Benchmark DAC1 as well as the Monarchy M24 tube DAC/line stage. Only while using this digital cable has the sound of a DAC rivaled the smoothness and palpability of the Saturn. I especially enjoyed the sound with the Monarchy M24, and I use the Saturn/Magnan digital cable/Monarchy combo in several reviews since it produces an utterly fluid sound with breathtaking immediacy. Of all the cables Magnan offers, this is one of the best values, since it influences all that follows in the signal chain. If you are looking for a superb transport/DAC combination, I adjure you to audition the Magnan Digital cable! I had some real difficulties with these speaker cables in that I found it hard to remove them from my speakers, especially speakers with a tendency to emphasize the upper mids and treble. The issue wasn’t physical in the least; they were difficult to take off because once they go on, you’ll not soon want to remove them! And that’s the flat out truth! Conclusion? These cables are Magnan-ificent! Bearing the touch of their creator, Dave Magnan, they have superior resolving capacity, gentle touch on the ear, and a packed, full-spectrum sound. It is a wonder that the audiophile community has not glommed onto Magnan Cables. I believe they are of a caliber that they should be strongly considered for systems up to $20k, and would not be embarrassed in systems above that price point.
Also read Doug Schroeder’s article on: Thou shalt not listen to any solid-state integrated with stock jumpers!
Thou shalt not skimp on power cords!
Solid-state DAC
Solid-state preamplifier & monoblock amplifiers
Solid-state Integrated amplifier
preamplifier
tube hybrid integrated amplifier
with Dussun V8i
Jena Labs "Jazz" & "Java" cables
tube amplification system
MIT AVt MA cable system & Z-Stabilizer
CD player
loudspeaker system
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