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Game over? End game? This speaker represents both. For the listener deeply entrenched in audiophile ritual, belief and habit, the s1 is game over for amps. Obviously. But preamps seem out as well. With units of Trafomatic Audio SM101D, ModWright LS-100 and Esoteric C-03 caliber on hand—single-stage direct-heated triode, 6SN7-based two-stage hybrid, solid-state respectively—none sounded remotely as good as no preamp. To leave surprisingly sleepy first gear as though one foot stayed glued to the brake meant any one of my three D/A converters with variable outputs. Be it the Weiss DAC2, Antelope Audio Zodiac Gold/Voltikus or April Music Eximus DP1 (sequence in ascending order of personal taste), they made far better sound direct over inserting any of my costly preamps behind them. If you've heard an original Quad speaker and thought it pipe 'n' slippers boring—aka very resolved but too polite, laid-back and bereft of jump factor—that's the direction the sound took with them. Yawn.

Because my best DAC inside the Esoteric/APL Hifi UX-1/NWO-M has no volume control, I ended up with it and a Bakoon BPS-02 battery-powered Audiophilleo 2 running into my trusted Bent Audio Tap X autoformer volume control. That's a passive of the highest caliber. Even so, make no mistake. Between my four sources the sonic window of variability or shift latitude was quite narrow. I think that's because the amp/speaker interface really is the dominant determinant on final sonics. Here Manger not only fixed it for you but optimized it beyond anything a passive speaker with your choice of amp could duplicate. The upshot is crystal. Should you not fancy the MSMs1 sound, any attempts at changing direction with strategic source and preamp selection won't jump the built-in track. Kismet, predeterminism and the lot. But the inverse is just as true. Fancy the MSMs1 and concerns over 'properly ambitious' ancillaries are seriously alleviated too. The degree of possible change or flavoring is quite small. Again you won't jump tracks. That's why the name of this game is Over!


End game! The end game reality is a function of engineering. At €13.200, the intrinsically bi-amped actively filtered and equalized MSMs1 can't be trumped by any equivalently priced combination of passive speaker and amps you might come up with. Period. That's a very hurtful thing to audiophile pride with its silly insistence on arbitrary mixing & (mis)matching without global impedance standards. But it's a perfect thing for those who want guaranteed turn-key success at a very high level. And one mustn't completely abstain from audiophile tweaking either. While the whole active concept and XLR interface spells pro audio and we-know-better attitude (on what really matters), quick experiments with power delivery show that audiophiles know a thing too. When I replaced Daniela Manger's long generic Swiss power cords jacked directly into the wall with Crystal Cable equivalents tapping a GigaWatt PC-3 SE Evo conditioner instead, bass weight, tone color intensity and general robustness each took a noticeable step up.


The same audiophile know-how on preamps however—which in a traditional passive speaker system can be surprisingly determinant—had to accept the wisdom of saving money and kissing the breed good-bye*. This gets us to a second end-game aspect. If one means to cap total system expense with a pair of Mangers at €20.000, a €3.000 DAC like the Eximus with a €2.000 iMac with Audirvana in integer/direct mode leaves about €2.000 for cabling and sundry. With such elevated performance plus built-in flexibility to compensate for placement, room conditions and listener tastes, that's very high value. Twenty large are serious coin. But here are very significant returns too and serious mitigation of the usual insecurities on whether goodness you heard there will transpose intact to your own system here.
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* This is mere conjecture but musing why my preamps which usually are so good with FirstWatt's SIT1 monos made such a bad showing here, I predict that the built-in amps are quite complex multi-stage circuits with high feedback. If more is less, such 'moreness' on the part of the amplifiers would explain why preamps weren't welcome; and why a simple buffered attenuator in a very good but not excessive D/A converter performed so much better.


Against this backdrop we will now inspect the sound up close. The entire system consisted of my usual iMac (Audirvana 1.3.9.8, PureMusic 1.86 as backup) fed via a split KingRex USB cable to a battery-powered Audiophilleo USB converter into the NWO as DAC, from there via RCA cables to the Tap X and from there via long Mogami XLR cables (Neutrik RCA to XLR adaptors on the Tap X) to the Manger MSWs1. The latter were powered through Adam Schubert's Polish power conditioner with 2m runs of Crystal Cable cords.