Positively dB’s Feedback: Magnan Cables, and Michael Green’s PZC’s
by Doug Blackburn

This issue there is again more to tell you about than space so I’ll narrow the field down to some of my more enjoyable high-end experiences of late. Magnan Signature speaker cable and interconnect is a most interesting and very different approach to good sounding audio cables. Michael Green Designs newest room acoustic treatment products, Pressure Zone Controllers, take Room Tune products to the next level of performance.

David Magnan has been well known in high-end cable circles ever since his Vi interconnect was very positively reviewed in a number of magazines in the late 80’s and early ‘90s. Vi continues to be made in a new and improved design. Interestingly, owners of "gen 1" Vi having RCA jacks can return their cables to Magnan for updating to "gen 2" spec for a modest charge. The Vi set out to be a different kind of audio interconnect. It uses a single, very thin ribbon of bronze as the conductor. This gives Vi a fair amount of resistance/impedance compared to typical audio interconnects which measure near zero ohms. Magnan found through his own listening tests, that minimizing "skin effect" in audio cables produced better sound. Magnan found that very thin cables were excellent at reducing or eliminating the artifacts of "skin effect." His cable designs take the "reduction of skin effect" design philosophy to maximum practical limits. One of the major benefits of audio cables with minimum "skin effect" is that propagation speed is very uniform at all audio frequencies, time delays and phase shifts are minimized. Vi was one of the first audio cables to explore "better sound through thinness." Indeed, Vi was heralded as one of these best performing interconnects at any price. Gen 2 Vi is still reasonably priced at $595 per 4 foot pair and it is still an excellent performer.

Magnan Signature Interconnect
As time went on Magnan experimented with other ways to take the Vi approach even farther… thinner conductors with even better signal propagation characteristics. At the same time, Magnan wanted to find a way of delivering "Magnan performance" in a speaker cable product where high impedance would not be tolerable. The results are Magnan Signature interconnect ($1,650 per 4 foot pair) and Magnan Signature speaker cable ($995 per 8’ single-wire stereo pair, $1990 per 8’ stereo bi-wire). Looking at the interconnect first we find a bigger-than-a-garden-hose cable product. This is due to multiple layers of wide ribbon conductors and damping material laid-up and rolled into a fat round cable dressed with silver mesh nylon. The cables are so fat, 2 of them could not plug in to many pairs of RCA jacks because the RCAs on components are often closer together than the diameter of these big interconnects. To overcome this, Magnan attaches a 3" stub of small diameter round wire to the end of each cable giving enough flexibility that they easily connect to almost any component you might have in your system. Magnan selected very cool RCAs which have a sliding outer sleeve. The outer (ground) sleeve always contacts the outside of the female RCA first to complete the ground circuit. As you continue to push the cable onto the female RCA, the outer sleeve pushes back allowing the center pin to enter the female RCA on the component. This "ground always makes first" RCA works so well that you get no noise at all when "live plugging" equipment – not recommended, ever, but nice to know that if you do forget and do it with Magnan Signature interconnects that you have an extra level of protection.

Internally, the Magnan Signature interconnects have unique conductors. I do not believe any other audio cable in the world uses anything like this conductor. Magnan starts with very thin Teflon ribbons. Each ribbon is coated with a non-metallic conductive film – that’s right, there is no metal in the conductors of the Signature interconnect. Each ribbon is then insulated. Several of these wide, non-metallic ribbon conductors are then sandwiched with layers of damping material. The longer the interconnect is going to be, the more layers of conductor and damping material have to be in the cable to keep resistance near the practical limit for a commercial product. One characteristic of the non-metallic conductive film is that it has quite a bit of resistance compared to a copper conductor. So much resistance that a 4 foot length of Magnan Signature interconnect is specified as having a nominal 30,000 ohms of resistance. I measured a DC resistance of 24,000 ohms in a 4 foot cable. Initially, this sounds like bad news… how could a cable possibly sound good with that much resistance? Very easily when the conductor you found to have the best possible performance in the time/phase domain happens to have significant resistance. 30,000 ohms (nominal) turned out to give the best possible sound quality with the widest range of compatibility with amps, preamps and source components. Because of the need to keep the total resistance in Signature interconnect cables somewhere close to 30,000 ohms, Magnan has to limit the maximum length of Signature interconnects to 10 feet. Beyond 10 feet the cable size and construction time just gets out of hand. If you require balanced interconnects with XLR connectors, the maximum length is normally limited to 5 feet, though there may be times when Magnan could go as long as 7 feet. The balanced version was not reviewed for this article.

You may still be shaking your head over that 30,000 ohm resistance spec… you just know that good cables have to have near zero impedance and resistance, right? We’ve been taught this for as long as we have been reading audio magazines. The Magnan Signature interconnects made me re-evaluate the role of resistance in an audio interconnect. Signature has high resistance for a reason. The design goal was to move all audio frequencies down the cable at exactly the same speed. This does not happen with cables that use conventional wire. Conventional low resistance cable construction using conductors with relatively thick cross-section (30 gauge wire is "thick" compared to the conductors in Signature!) introduce phase shifts and time delays which are different at different audio frequencies. Magnan believes that drastically reducing these "skin effect" artifacts produces audible benefits in spite of the time delays and phase shifts being smaller than what is commonly accepted as audible. We all know about things that are "commonly accepted" right? "Commonly accepted" is not a synonym for "true."

The Signature interconnect sounds exceptional. It is absolutely one of the great interconnects. The first thing you notice is that there is no "smear" at all. I had been using several well regarded cables prior to receiving the Magnan Signature for review and they sounded great to me. However, once I heard how Magnan Signature removed smear, I had a whole new perspective on interconnects and how much they could affect a system. It was a clear case of "you never know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…". I had no idea those other cables were smearing the sound that much. Pop in the Signature and you sit there in astonishment for a few minutes just soaking in what a "smearless" wire sounds like. Then you find yourself enumerating all the bad things those other wires were doing to the sound. As a result of the lack of smear in the music, listening becomes a more organic and relaxing experience than ever before. It is possible for reasonable periods of time to forget that electronic equipment is reproducing music in your home. Not that the sound becomes exactly like live. Recordings aren’t that good yet. But you do feel your jaw muscles relax, your neck softens up, your legs aren’t looking for excuses to get up and tweak something… you are perfectly content to relax and listen to the music.

Signature interconnect makes me "feel" better about the music. I found no desire to analyze the sound of Signature, I just wanted to listen to music coming thought it. Which made the review a bit difficult. You guys want me to describe the sound of Signature in minute detail. Well, OK, I’ll do some of that, but only reluctantly. There is so much more going on with this cable than a description of its sound can reveal that you really need to experience it for yourself. After the lack of smear, the next thing you notice is the "rightness" of the sound. I was expecting some kind of obvious bass floppiness or top end roll off from the high impedance. But it didn’t happen. Instead, I heard "rightness." Harmonics are rich and pure, neither enhanced or restrained. Top to bottom coherence is exemplary. Transparency is right on the money… completely clear without resorting to rising top end energy to make the cable seem to be transparent. Detail is magnificent, not because there is more than any other cable, but because it is natural detail, not hyped up or spotlighted detail. My listening notes over the months kept repeating "that’s how it’s supposed to sound."

Perspective is a little recessed from my neutral ideal. Generally I would look for a wire that put the center of the soundstage between the 2 speakers with some sound seeming to originate closer than the speakers and some sound quite a bit more distant. Magnan Signature puts the center of the soundstage just behind the speakers and extends the stage forward of that point and well behind it as the recording dictates. I have heard other cables that recess the soundstage quite a bit more than the Magnan Signature. So let’s not get too obsessive about this point… the Signature interconnect may put the center of the soundstage a little behind the speakers, but there is not a "distant" feeling to the presentation.

Dynamics are something I never really thought much about when listening to Signature. I suppose that is a rather un-obvious compliment. I never felt dynamics were being manipulated in any way. There is an ease in the way sounds are reproduced that turns off the audiophile receptor center in the left brain and turns on the way under utilized "quit thinkin’; and listen to the music" right brain. When I did think about listening to dynamics, I found nothing to fault. At times seemed like there was less going on sonically when using the Magnan interconnects but I found that other cables were doing things that hyped the sound. Bottom line on sonics is that Magnan Signature interconnect is a top notch performer in the "natural" category. If you’re looking for fireworks and hyped sound, go elsewhere.

There are some caveats about Magnan Signature interconnects. The first consideration is cable length… if you must have more than 10 feet with RCAs (no more than 5’ to 7’ with XLRs), you can’t use this cable. Next is the loss due to the impedance. I detect 2 – 3 dB loss with the Magnan Signature interconnect. If you put a pair on your DAC and a second pair from the preamp to the amp, you’ll lose 4 to 6 dB of gain in the system. In most systems all you’ll have to do to compensate is turn up the volume control a little. However, if your line stage has only 10 dB or so of gain and you need the gain, you might find yourself dynamically limited. If you use a passive line stage or separate passive volume controls, you will effectively have 2 pairs of Magnan Signature in series between amp and preamp for at least a 4 to 6 dB signal loss. This might be fine if the digital front end puts out 3 volts instead of 1-2 volts and has some current behind it. But if the output stage of the digital front end is a little on the weak side for directly driving an amplifier, Magnan Signature will sap too much additional energy. If your system is a little short on gain, you could consider using only 1 pair of Magnan Signature, perhaps between preamp and amp. To connect source components, you could use the low loss Magnan Vi interconnect.

The final potential limitation to the use of Magnan Signature interconnect is a matching problem. A few amplifiers I tried just would not work properly with Magnan Signature. I’m assigning the "problem" to the amplifiers because changing preamps did not induce the problem in different amps and did not solve the problem in the "problem" amps. If the amp has a challenge with Magnan Signature interconnects, you will hear a lot of hiss when you turn the amplifier on. Replacing the Magnan Signature with other interconnects will stop the hiss. The hiss is obvious, but not close to being system threatening — but the hiss is plenty loud enough that there is no question that hiss is happening. I never heard varying degrees of this hiss problem either. In other words, if a hiss problem existed, it was loud enough to be obvious, but far softer than anything that would harm your system. There were no amps that showed only tiny increases in hiss… you either get the whole "big hiss" thing or nothing. I had hiss problems with stereo and mono solid state amps from one manufacturer, and in high wattage push-pull triode monoblocks from another company. Various other solid state and tube amps performed their jobs silently with the Magnan Signature interconnects.

Magnan Signature Speaker Cable
Moving smartly along to Magnan Signature speaker cable… here we have something completely different from the interconnect. Speakers demand more current handling capability, and this requires a large gauge conductor with close to zero resistance. Obviously, a cable made like Signature interconnect would have to be impossibly huge if it were to be successful for use as a speaker cable. To overcome the resistance/impedance problem, Magnan returned to the old standby… copper. Each length Magnan Signature speaker cable has a single copper conductor. But it isn’t a round one, nor square. Keeping his model of minimum conductor thickness to eliminate the "skin effect" problems of time delays and phase shifts, Magnan chose to use a single copper ribbon 0.00075 inch thick. That is 7.5 ten thousandths of an inch! Well, heck, how do you get speaker cable with low enough resistance from copper ribbon that thin? You make the ribbon 5 inches wide, that’s how! That’s about the width of a CD jewel case. If you do the math on a single ribbon .00075 thick and 5 inches wide, you get a result that surprised me… about 13 gauge. This makes Magnan Signature a useful speaker cable for most speakers. If you have speakers which are 2 ohms (or less) and you’re driving them with a huge amp because the speakers are none too efficient, Magnan Signature might not be the best speaker cable for you. But if you’re using speakers rated at 3 ohms or higher with typical amplifiers from a few watts to hundreds of watts, the Magnan Signature speaker cable will work just fine.

There are problems to worry about when the conductor is only .00075 thick. The first thing Magnan had to do was to cover the ribbon for insulation and protection. This he did with flexible black insulation. That didn’t look so great sitting on the floor of a nicely appointed audio room, so a black herringbone braided nylon jacket covers the black plastic insulation. In the cables I received there are a few weaving imperfections in the nylon covering. When I asked Magnan about it he was forthcoming with an easy explanation. He uses the manufacturers standard stocked nylon material. This is the way the material is manufactured and sold. Appearance is not a requirement. To get "perfect" nylon material with higher density weave would have added about $500 to the cost of each 8 foot pair of Signature speaker cables. While some audiophiles will pine for the perfect cover material, most of us are quite happy to save $500 ($1000 bi-wire!) that we can invest elsewhere in the system.

Connecting two 5 inch wide cables for each channel to most amplifiers would be pretty tough so Magnan had to design a sturdy and reliable termination method that would make a commercial product out of the 5 inch wide ribbon conductors. He ended up folding the ends of the copper ribbon to a blunt point, covering this point with a plastic reinforcement "boot", and attaching a 3 inch round conductor "stub" to the end of the cable. You can have banana or spade terminations on the 3 inch stub making Magnan Signature speaker cable compatible with most amplifiers and speakers. The reinforced boot on the end of the cable provides strain relief for the 3 inch wire stub as well as protecting the delicate copper foil from the edges of chassis and heat sinks it might have to co-exist with.

I won’t spend a lot of time on the sound of the Magnan Signature speaker cable because it is virtually identical to the Signature interconnect. Whaa…?! Right. I can hardly believe it myself. How could an interconnect with non-metallic film for conductors and 30,000 ohms of resistance sound almost identical to a 13 gauge copper ribbon? I’m not real sure. But it definitely makes me think harder about Magnan’s obsession with thin conductors and reduction of "skin effect" artifacts. If very different cables made from very different materials can be made to sound so much alike, there must be something to Magnan’s hypothesis.

The Signature speaker cable shares the same perspective, transparency, detail and listenability with the interconnects. Like the interconnect, the speaker cable is not obviously "exciting". It’s the kind of thing that demands that you sit down and listen before it reveals its special charm. Oddly, after listening to Signature speaker cable for a while, I became certain that it was robbing the system of detail and dynamics because things just weren’t as exciting as I thought they should be. When I changed speaker cables to one of the other excellent cables on hand, it became obvious that Signature speaker cable was giving up nothing. It did make music more relaxing than many other cables can and it didn’t take long to appreciate the natural relaxed sound. As my time with the Signature speaker cable increased, it became increasingly obvious that the relaxed nature of the sound came from its just about perfect presentation.

Cable Comparison — Magnan, Nordost and Nirvana
In order to put Magnan cable sound in perspective, I compared it to Nordost SPM Reference ($1,150/meter interconnect, $3,350/8 feet speaker cable) and Nirvana S-L series ($795/meter interconnect, $1,495/8 feet speaker cable). Comments on sound quality apply equally to interconnect and speaker cable. All three of these products share the smear-free presentation that is a hallmark of the very best performing interconnects and speaker cables.

Nordost SPM Reference

Nirvana Audio S-L series

Magnan Signature

All of these cables throw a large and wonderful soundstage, which is so similar among them that soundstage concerns can be eliminated from the selection process. Likewise, the tonality of all of them is excellent. For me, there is no clear winner in this group of fine cables, but I do find Magnan Signature in use for extended periods of time with no desire to want to change. It is going to be a matter of system needs and personal taste that will be the determining factors in selecting one of these 3 fine products over the other.

Michael Green’s Pressure Zone Controllers
Last year I visited Michael Green for a day and reported on this second trip to Ohio Amish country right here in the pages of Positive Feedback. During that trip, I learned all about Pressure Zone Controllers and got to hear them in action. This primed me to get them into my listening room to report on their performance. You may recall that I’d already done the room treatment program 2 times. First with Room Tune Deluxe Room Tunes and a small pile of Echo Tunes. Then in 1997, the amazing Argent Room Lens appeared and was significantly better sounding and more expensive than the original Room Tune products. Here we are at "Room Tuning: Round 3"!

The UPS driver arrived and seemed to unload boxes for 15 minutes. Box after box. In all they sent 16 PZCs in 4 different sizes for my largish room. Michael and Lance (Binns) sent PZCs with gray cloth covering the wood frame with a solid (not veneer) cherry hardwood tuning board on the front facing the room. Other cloth coverings available are ivory and black. The cherry hardwood tuning board is an extra cost option that gives customers the "warmth of wood" when that suits the d�cor the most. The standard tuning board is painted medium density fiberboard (mdf). The standard paint finishes are semi-gloss black, semi-gloss white or primer. If you select the primer finish, you can easily paint the tuning boards the same color as your walls.

PZCs consist of an open wood frame, about 4 inches thick for wall-mount PZCs. Imagine the PZC frame as 2 rectangular picture frames with 4 inch legs connecting them in the corners to form a rectangular box shape. Cover the frame with cloth and slap a solid panel on 1 side and you almost have the whole picture. In the center of the solid wood panel is a brass tuning bolt – a very special tuning bolt designed by Michael Green and perfected by listening to numerous prototypes. Behind the board, surrounding the hole the tuning bolt goes into is a white ring that touches the back of the tuning board. As you tighten the tuning bolt, you couple the board increasingly tightly to this white ring. You do not put tension on the board, you only affect how tightly the board is pressing against the white ring. The brass tuning bolt provides an adjustment range suitable for a wide variety of room types. I was a little intimidated with the thought of having to find the perfect tuning point for all 16 tuning bolts. My fears turned out to be unwarranted. It was actually pretty easy.

The PZC array went up like this:

Michael Green’s Pressure Zone Controllers are definitely a more advanced room treatment device than the original Room Tune devices. Original Room Tunes give you nice improvements for very reasonable cost. The Pressure Zone Controllers cost a bit more but are still moderately priced from about $75 each for the smallest model with standard tuning board to about $380 for the largest model with cherry tuning board. After hearing how much more effective the PZCs are, I highly recommend spending the small price increase over the standard Room Tune products.

PZCs continue Michael Green’s philosophy that excessive damping of a listening room is not good for achieving the best sound quality. PZCs contain only small amounts of absorbent material at critical locations. PZCs are primarily energy gathering and release mechanisms. PZCs gather sound energy from the open sides, top and bottom and release the gathered energy 3 different ways: some to the tuning board on the front which puts the energy back into the room; some to the wall/structure of the room through the frame of the PZC; some to the small amount of absorbent material inside the PZC.

The only "problem" I had with the PZCs was that the floor standing models were so light in weight that the 4 supplied MTD (Mechanical Tuning Device, brass cones) would not pierce through the carpet and pad into the subfloor. This limited their performance a bit. I tried 10 pounds of sand and 17 pound iron dumb bells on the bases in an attempt to get the spikes to stay in contact with the floor but it just wasn’t going to happen. The light weight floor standing PZCs really need a spike with a very thin profile so that there is half a chance of piercing through carpet. In addition, 4 MTDs feet is over-kill with something this light in weight. 3 MTD feet would concentrate the weight on the 3 MTDs… an additional help when trying to pierce though carpet.

The wall mount PZCs went up pretty smoothly but you do need to measure everything very carefully to make sure you get the screws in the right places. I got tired towards the end and on the next to last 36" corner PZC I mis-measured for 2 of the screws making more holes than I really needed or wanted. Speaking of holes… in the name of bringing Positive Feedback readers the best possible information about PZCs, I ended up making 36 holes in the walls of my beloved listening room, plus the 2 mistakes. Talk about above and beyond the call of duty. "Honey, aren’t those things going to leave marks and holes in the walls when you are done with them?" "Oh, no dear, any marks will wipe right off (not!) and the holes are easy to fill with spackle (white spackle filling holes in light gray/blue walls is always a nice look!)."

To begin the review, I set the tuning bolts on all the PZCs to the same point, about half way through their adjustment range. Then I just listened for a month or so. Interesting. The room sounded better for sure. Within a few more weeks, I had experimented with adjusting the tuning bolts and had a good handle on what they were doing. If someone adjusted even one of them while I was listening to music, I could hear the soundstage change as if some special effect was being applied to it. Eventually I realized that the most obvious thing the tuning bolts did was to control the apparent size of the soundstage. You can get a tightly focused smallish soundstage with the tuning bolts tight. As you loosen the tuning bolts, the soundstage gets larger and larger with less focus on the center image. This doesn’t mean the center image gets worse, it means that the center image became less of a focal point and more of an element of the whole. I also noticed that the looser the tuning bolts were, the less the room seemed to be "in the picture". In other words, loosening the tuning bolts seemed to make the walls a lot less important to the sound of the room. Removing the tuning bolt altogether sounded pretty bad; it really does have a key role in the functionality of the PZCs. I ended up with all of the tuning bolts being just tight enough to couple the board to the white ring under the board. Other rooms may end up with other adjustment points though… that’s why the tuning bolt is there.

Describing what the PZCs did to the sound of the room is the hardest part of this evaluation. I feel like I have to invent a completely new vocabulary and define each adjective before you could begin to get a grip on what happens without hearing it for yourself. By far the easiest way to understand PZCs is to hear them in action. There are increasing numbers of dealers with PZC’d demo rooms. The helpful people at Michael Green’s Audio/Video Designs (1-888-Roomtune) may be able to direct you to one in your area. Trying to keep the description of what PZCs do to a reasonable length here will require some restraint and will miss some of the finer details, but I’ll take a shot at it.

The most obvious change is that the walls become less important. The walls (and ceiling and floor) don’t exactly disappear, but they become less obvious and contribute less to the overall sound you hear at the listening position. Sounds you never heard before because room/wall effects obscured them are audible now. This is important to "get". The PZCs don’t enhance anything, but they do remove some obscuring/masking that the room contributes. There is absolutely no feeling of loss or deadness that you get with some room treatment devices. PZCs lend a warm organic character to the room’s sound… or maybe they remove some sterility so you can hear the warmth and organic nature of the recorded performance. Either way, once you hear it you’ll think "Oh yeah! This is more like it!" After 2 or 3 months you begin to wonder how you could ever stand to listen to music in your room without the PZCs. I did have to keep reminding myself that they were doing good things though. On 4 separate occasions I removed the entire set which involved ladder work to reach the 8 PZCs mounted at the top of my 10 � foot ceiling. Each time it took only seconds to hear what was missing again. I would find myself thinking "Right. That’s what my specially designed room sounds like without the PZCs. I remember it all too well." Not that my room sounds bad "naked," it’s actually pretty darn good as listening rooms go. Putting PZCs in it just takes things to a whole new level. You can’t say the walls disappear, but they sure do get a heck of a lot more cooperative with the PZCs in the room. The PZCs remove all or most of the limitations of the room without doing anything so radical that unnatural sound results. For example, if PZCs really did make the walls disappear, the listening experience would be very disconcerting and unnatural… you’d probably not be able to relax while listening. The PZCs work with the room rather than trying to bend the room into something that it is not.

The wall mount PZCs tend to do more to the sound around the outer 1/2 of the room. The outward fill of the soundstage is controlled to a great degree by the wall-mount PZCs. If you struggle to get your soundstage to extend beyond the outside edges of your speakers, PZCs just may be the magic bullet you need to get the area outside the speakers filled in. The floor-standing PZCs can be put anywhere… to further increase the outward soundstage fill, to focus the center image, to restrict first reflection from side walls, they are sort of all-purpose players.

The next experiment was to see how the Argent Room Lenses and PZCs worked together. I was expecting they’d duke it out with the result being sound less good than either one by itself. Surprise! Together, the sound was better than ever. Quantifying this is tough… certainly there is not a doubling of sound quality when both are used together. Room Lenses and PZCs don’t sound quite alike either so it is difficult to assign a meaningful "value" to each one. For the sake of trying to put this in perspective, let me assign an arbitrary "10" to the performance of the PZCs and Room Lenses separately. This is compared to a bare room which is the "0" anchor point for this example. Also understand that these "10" ratings do not indicate identical sonic properties. Under these "rules" I’d say that the PZCs and Room Lenses together would justify a "15" rating. Only you can decide if the combined cost of Michael Green’s PZCs and Argent Room Lenses is worth the performance improvement. I like it al lot though, it’ll be awfully hard to give this level of sound quality up.

Sonically the Room Lens clarifies, reveals detail, solidifies the soundstage and removes some things you’ll recognize as "room artifacts" once they are gone. In a properly reflective room the sound remains very open and energetic. On the other hand, the PZCs make walls seem less important, sound becomes warmer, more organic and relaxed — which in my book describes "natural." With PZCs you can adjust the "fill" of the soundstage from center to outer edges. This permits you to set-up your speakers to make a great center image then tune the PZCs to fill out the outside edges of the soundstage. Both products are useful, both are different. If you can’t do both at the same time, you might select the PZCs as the first treatment if you desire the presentation to be warmer and wider. The Room Lenses should be first if you sense that the room is congesting or masking sound. Both devices relieve some of the feeling of "being in a room." The PZCs do it in a rich way that removes some of the antiseptic sound you can get from "modern" home construction (i.e. studs and drywall). The Room Lenses do it in a more neutral way. I have very high respect for the Room Lenses and PZCs as solo room treatment devices that can also work together.

PZCs are a fairly new component of Michael Green’s Unified Theory of Variable Mechanical Resonance Tuning. From Tunable Room hardware you install under floors, behind walls and behind ceilings to equipment racks with variable tuning capabilities to variable tuning in loudspeakers to tuning existing rooms, Michael covers all the bases. Michael used what he learned from building tunable rooms from scratch to come up with products suitable for "fixing" rooms that were already built. Further experience with improving the acoustics in churches, auditoriums and music halls went into refinement of the PZC design. The results give audiophiles and home theater enthusiasts who can’t build a tunable room from the ground up an opportunity to give their existing room some of the capabilities of a full blown Tunable Room. You can be pretty sure PZCs won’t be the last product we’ll see from Michael. His recent relationship with United Musical Instruments (a major musical instrument manufacturer) will expand mechanical tuning and variable resonance control further into improving the sound of live music. This is sure to lead to products that home audio and home theater enthusiasts will find very useful in their quest for the ultimate music reproduction systems.

The bottom line on the Pressure Zone Controllers is that Michael Green has taken room tuning products into a realm they have never reached before. Using his mechanical tuning techniques and a unique vision of how sound travels along walls and into corners, he has come up with a moderately priced line of unique devices that can bring years of endless listening satisfaction. Incorporating tunable elements in each product in the PZC line assures that they will suit a wide variety of listening rooms. So here you have a product that will make you system sound better no matter what else is changed. They will never break, they don’t need burn-in, they can be moved to other rooms, they don’t need re-tubing, they don’t need fancy power cords — unfortunately this won’t sound glamorous enough to some audiophiles.

Screw ‘em — the rest of us will enjoy our music more!

Magnan Cables, Inc.
355 Lantana, #576
Camarillo, CA 93010
Tel Fax: 805-484-9544
Email: [email protected]
Web site: www.magnan.com

Signature Interconnect: $1650/4’ pair
Signature speaker cable: $995/8’ single-wire pair
Vi Interconnect: $595/4’ pair

Michael Green’s Audio/Video Designs
221 West High Ave.
New Philadelphia, OH 44663
Voice: 888-766-6886
Fax: 330-308-5600
Email: [email protected]

Pressure Zone Controller Retail Prices:
Mini Corner Controller- $ 74.95 ea. (+$15 for cherry tuning board)
Mini Echo Controller- $ 99.95 ea. (+$15 for cherry)
36" Wall Mount Controller $179.95 ea. (+$90 for cherry)
48" Wall Mount Controller- $289.95 ea. (+$90 for cherry) (not reviewed)
Ceiling Mount Controller- $179.95 ea. (+$60 for cherry) (not reviewed)
Floor Standing Controller $224.95 ea. (+$90 for cherry)

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