On passive display in the room adjoining their demonstration room was a single Magico Ultimate v.3 horn speaker, shown here with Magico's Alon Wolf for scale. A five-way design costing a mind-boggling $600,000/system, the speaker’s higher-frequency horns feature a Tractrix flare, the lower-midrange horn a trapezoidal flare, all of which blend smoothly into the baffle. A 15" sealed-box woofer handles frequencies below 125Hz.

Seen from behind, I was reminded of something I have felt for a long time: that a successful full-range horn speaker must be a multiway design, as a horn’s linear passband is relatively limited by the cutoff of the flare at the low-frequency end and by the internal reflections from the mouth of the horn at the high-frequency end.