By Keijo Tanskanen

Foreword

Nowadays, there is rarely true high-end premieres in Finland. Fortunately, there are some importers who still have courage and will to organize them. Hifi Guru is one of them. Hifi Guru had quite a long time plan to set up an audio system which would fulfil his very high sonic criteria. During the last summer, Guru finally put it in practice. After purchasing some missing equipment and setting the system up carefully, he decided to arrange a two-day open doors event, which I naturally could not miss.

Again, because of my very tight schedules, I had to ask a specific time slot for my visit. Hifi Guru kindly accepted my request which was scheduled to quite early morning and outside the official opening hours. By the aid of this arrangement, I had a possibility to have a spot seat for my whole listening session, without bothering of the other listeners.

Having finished my listening, I had some refreshments in the kitchen, which were an excellent supplement, once again. This happened just in time, because the other visitors started to arrive! So, there were other people as well who were interested in very high-quality audio and brand new Magneplanar 30.7s!

”

The Setup

The set up was very simply stunning! Just seeing it was a great experience and listening to it even more so. The setup consisted of the following equipment:

Magneplanar 30.7 loudspeakers

Burmester MusicCenter 151 digital source

MSB Premiere DAC

Clearaudio Master Reference / TT2 tonearm / Stradivari V2 cartridge analogue source

Burmester 077 preamplifier

Burmester 911 mk3 monoblocks

Burmester 948 power filter

Transparent 75 ohm digital cable

Transparent XL G5 balanced interconnects

Transparent Reference XL MM2 speaker cables

Transparent Opus and XL power cords

Listening

I started my session using Hifi Guru's digital samples but continued soon with my regular test discs. The ending of the session was done with Hifi Guru's vinyl samples, which included for example Paganini's violin music. The following comments and views are based on the experiences of the whole session and music repertoire which I listened to. Although the setup is evaluated as a whole, naturally, I strongly believe that it was MG 30.7 which gave the strongest stamp to the sound. Because of this, I concentrate mostly on the MG 30.7 in my comments.

MG 30.7s seemed to be true full range loudspeakers, actually, I mean FULL RANGE LOUDSPEAKERS! I could hear the lowest octave of organs and very lows of synthesizers, but also the highest timbres of the music, limited only by my ears and my ability to collect information. Additionally, this was done in a way which ties all the four individual bandwidths, which were delivered by the separate speaker elements, together seamlessly and naturally. The four-way construction worked beautifully, which is not self-evident at all among loudspeakers, including even the most expensive ones.

Dynamically, MG 30.7 seemed to take remarkable steps to the direction where the best conventionally constructed high-end speakers stay. There was plenty of punch available even with the rock music samples. In this manner, besides many others, it is clearly the best magnetostatic loudspeaker I have ever heard. However, if you like to listen to the music at rock concert like volumes and love the way how big speaker cones deliver explosive drum hits, you may stay missing that sound. Because of the construction, although significantly bettered, MG 30.7 is still slightly limited in this manner. But having not heard any monsterous traditional speakers with a proper setup, you may well be totally satisfied with the MG 30.7 in this manner as well.

Maggies have been shining on their treble performance with their ribbon tweeters for at least two decades, although continuous development has been done. In this manner, the latest models, and now, especially the MG 30.7s, are among the best ones available. The listening results were exemplarily clean, shimmering and well-integrated into the midrange. Personally, I would have liked to have a bit more treble for the music performances, but probably this reflects more my preferences than any real lack. Also, it might well be a question of an adjustments and/or companion equipment.

The dimensionality of the sonic picture was simply huge and extremely well organized. Layer by layer, organisation of the sonic view was simply stunning. In this manner, I cannot imagine better loudspeakers than MG 30.7s. Some of the enthusiasts may say that this feature is not important at all, but I would bet they would change their mind after hearing this setup. The questions to ask are: do you want to have live-like performance or how live-like performance do you want to have? What marvellous and transparent concert hall feelings I experienced at Hifi Guru in this manner!

The midrange naturalness was verified by the vocal and violin music. No harshness, broken smoothness or anything like that was discovered. Again, MG 30.7s must be one of the very best loudspeakers in this manner today, regardless of the price range. In a very deep analysis, the overall tone colours of the lower midrange and the bass seemed to have a tiny amount of traditional "maggie sound". I mean that the music deliverances had hints of specific fingerprints - a fact that also concerns my evaluation of the dynamics. But one may also take this in a different and positive way! After all, the final evaluation of the sound will depend on the preferences and attitudes of the "right sound". And, when I listened to the sound of a violin, it clearly was a very natural-like violin with rich harmonics. Isn't this important!


Conclusion

Hifi Guru delivered one of the best demoes I have ever heard on the era of high-end, hands down. At least, it was among the best ones or even the best one which I have ever heard at Guru. In many sonic areas, the performance was on the very top and my very few critics were more or less hair splitting. The setup was simply superb, and MG 30.7 proved to be a marvellous loudspeaker, although having slightly its' own style of music reproduction and being a bit music genre dependent. The new flagship of Magneplanars is also very directional. Therefore, I had to stay in the tight spot for reaching the optimal listening results. However, this was not a surprise. Instead, it was a natural result of the loudspeaker construction. Hifi Guru did true high-end milestone demoes during this open-doors event. I can honestly recommend visiting Hifi Guru also afterwards - magnificent listening experiences are available!