Post by ChrisB on Feb 16, 2016 16:54:06 GMT
Mirage M-3si Loudspeakers
I thought some might find it interesting to read a bit about my speakers as they aren’t very common in the UK and use a slightly different way of working from the norm.
I first heard about the Mirage bipolar arrangement when I read about the M-7, my speakers’ baby brothers, once removed. This would be back in the late eighties/early nineties, I suppose. The idea is that you use some output from the rear of the speaker so that you hear the reflections after they have bounced back off the rear wall. This is different from the dipole set up that you get with open baffles and some panel speakers where you are hearing the rear output of the front facing drivers as they return from travelling forward. In the case of a bipolar speaker, you have doubled up drivers facing backwards and wired up in phase with the front facing ones.
Prior to the Mirages, I’d used a short procession of speakers from SD Acoustics including the SD1s and the OBS, which used open baffle (dipole) mid and treble drivers and I loved the sense of air and space that they were able to convey. I got my last pair of OBS to sound utterly mesmerising with a solid state/valve cocktail of Radford and Levinson amps.
We moved to a house with a much bigger living room (over twice the size) and my business activity began to mean that there was a bit more cash to spend on gear, so I started looking for some new speakers. I auditioned all the usual suspects (new and used) up to about £3,500 and beyond and I couldn’t find anything that really excited me, so I began to look into the possibility of having an active cross-over built for the SD speakers, looking to capitalise on what I already had. I started talking seriously to a few audio engineers about it and the project was about to be given the green light when I heard a system containing a pair of the aforementioned Mirage M-7s. Now this was quite interesting and I borrowed them for a weekend to try in my system. What they did in my room was to throw a huge and very convincing soundstage that had me hooked. Next thing you know, a pair of their bigger, newer brothers, the M-3si turned up on Ebay that Sunday morning with no bids and 20 minutes until the end of the auction. After some frantic Googling, I skim read a Stereophile review and decided to have a crack at them. The upshot was that I won the auction with a bid of somewhere between £200 and £300 - I can’t remember if it was £208 or £280 - either way, not bad for a pair of £3,700 speakers!
Now, I’m very lucky to have a wife who likes music and appreciates a half decent stereo, so I was able to smile to myself at the misfortune of many of my hi-fi brethren when she said to me, “I think we might need a more powerful amplifier for these speakers, you know”.
It was what I had been thinking but didn’t want to mention just yet!
Well, the speakers, when packed in their boxes were too big for our big car, so to get them from Guildford back home to Lincolnshire, we had to hire a van. A van big enough to also fit a new amp! So we stopped at a dealership on the way down from Lincolnshire to audition several used power amps, including the one I thought would be perfect - a Mark Levinson ML-9, the 100 wpc big brother of the ML-11 that we already owned. Deal done, we put the ML into the van and headed for Guildford.
The owner of the speakers was heartbroken to be losing them - a returning ex-pat, he had just come home from a spell in Singapore and had bought the Mirages to go in his Quad system while he was there. He had compared and preferred them to electrostatics and had to have his pair specially imported from Canada at great expense. On returning to the UK, his wife had put her foot down and made him sell the Mirages in favour of some little Bose cubes. With a tear in his eye, he helped me load the van and we headed back up to Lincs.
Unpacked, the speakers were just beautiful - understated and elegant. Tall and wide but shallow black monoliths, they were quite obviously made with great attention to detail and with more than just an eye on sound quality.
Dimensions: 133 cm (H), 46 cmm (W), 21 cm (D) (in inches, that’s 52.5 x 18.1 x 8.3).
Weight: 61 kg (135 lbs).
It’s a three-way, ported loudspeaker with five drivers arranged front and back in a left and right handed configuration:
1 x 254 mm (10") carbon-filled polypropylene-cone woofer - front mounted.
2 x 127 mm (5”) carbon fiber/polypropylene-cone midrange drivers - one front and one rear mounted, connected in phase
2 x 25 mm (1”) titanium-dome, cloth suspension tweeters - one front and one rear mounted, connected in phase.
Drivers are all Mirage designs.
Crossover frequencies: 350Hz and 2kHz.
Frequency response: 30Hz–3kHz, ±2dB.
Impedance: 6 ohms nominal, 4 ohms minimum.
Sensitivity: 83dB at 2.83V (anechoic chamber at 1m). This seems low, but in fact I‘m told that it is misleading because the way this is measured means that it doesn’t truly reflect the output of the rear drivers. Certainly, I have never found them particularly hard to drive.
The cabinet is made from very thick mdf and there is a series of internal baffles made of 25mm mdf. If you do the knuckle test on them, all you get is sore knuckles! There are gloss black plinth, top piece and side cheeks. The top and bottom frame the full length cloth grille, which wraps around the front and rear baffle sides. The plinth is deeper than the cabinet and the solid all-metal binding posts are mounted on the rear, facing vertically upwards, just above ground level - they allow for bi-wiring or amping.
The idea of using drivers firing in different directions and taking advantage of the wall reflections isn’t new, by any means but it’s counter intuitive to many people when they consider what is and isn’t the ‘right way’ to make a loudspeaker. The Mirages need to be away from all walls to really do their stuff, so mine are placed on the long axis of the room, about a metre from the rear wall, perhaps 1.5 from the sides and widely spaced with a fair bit of toe-in. I use the two previously mentioned Mark Levinson amps, with the 100 watt ML-9 driving the bass and the 50 watt ML-11 driving the mid and treble.
I’ve had them for about ten years now and I’ve never really felt any desire to change them. The only thing I would like which I’d like that they don’t quite provide is the pin-point (to the millimetre) imaging that I’ve managed to get from some other speakers - all with narrower front baffles. The M-3si isn’t bad in this respect, it’s just that I know it can be done better. The bass from that 10 incher in a big cabinet is everything I need in this room - I can’t imagine there would be many people in the UK with rooms big enough to really need the top of the range M-1si model, which has all the drivers including the bass one doubled up - they’d need a house like an aircraft hanger. The star though, is that massive soundstage and if you thought a Gyrodec was good in this respect, you should try playing one into these speakers as I have been doing and you’ll see right away why I don’t want to change them.
Little and large!
I thought some might find it interesting to read a bit about my speakers as they aren’t very common in the UK and use a slightly different way of working from the norm.
I first heard about the Mirage bipolar arrangement when I read about the M-7, my speakers’ baby brothers, once removed. This would be back in the late eighties/early nineties, I suppose. The idea is that you use some output from the rear of the speaker so that you hear the reflections after they have bounced back off the rear wall. This is different from the dipole set up that you get with open baffles and some panel speakers where you are hearing the rear output of the front facing drivers as they return from travelling forward. In the case of a bipolar speaker, you have doubled up drivers facing backwards and wired up in phase with the front facing ones.
Prior to the Mirages, I’d used a short procession of speakers from SD Acoustics including the SD1s and the OBS, which used open baffle (dipole) mid and treble drivers and I loved the sense of air and space that they were able to convey. I got my last pair of OBS to sound utterly mesmerising with a solid state/valve cocktail of Radford and Levinson amps.
We moved to a house with a much bigger living room (over twice the size) and my business activity began to mean that there was a bit more cash to spend on gear, so I started looking for some new speakers. I auditioned all the usual suspects (new and used) up to about £3,500 and beyond and I couldn’t find anything that really excited me, so I began to look into the possibility of having an active cross-over built for the SD speakers, looking to capitalise on what I already had. I started talking seriously to a few audio engineers about it and the project was about to be given the green light when I heard a system containing a pair of the aforementioned Mirage M-7s. Now this was quite interesting and I borrowed them for a weekend to try in my system. What they did in my room was to throw a huge and very convincing soundstage that had me hooked. Next thing you know, a pair of their bigger, newer brothers, the M-3si turned up on Ebay that Sunday morning with no bids and 20 minutes until the end of the auction. After some frantic Googling, I skim read a Stereophile review and decided to have a crack at them. The upshot was that I won the auction with a bid of somewhere between £200 and £300 - I can’t remember if it was £208 or £280 - either way, not bad for a pair of £3,700 speakers!
Now, I’m very lucky to have a wife who likes music and appreciates a half decent stereo, so I was able to smile to myself at the misfortune of many of my hi-fi brethren when she said to me, “I think we might need a more powerful amplifier for these speakers, you know”.
It was what I had been thinking but didn’t want to mention just yet!
Well, the speakers, when packed in their boxes were too big for our big car, so to get them from Guildford back home to Lincolnshire, we had to hire a van. A van big enough to also fit a new amp! So we stopped at a dealership on the way down from Lincolnshire to audition several used power amps, including the one I thought would be perfect - a Mark Levinson ML-9, the 100 wpc big brother of the ML-11 that we already owned. Deal done, we put the ML into the van and headed for Guildford.
The owner of the speakers was heartbroken to be losing them - a returning ex-pat, he had just come home from a spell in Singapore and had bought the Mirages to go in his Quad system while he was there. He had compared and preferred them to electrostatics and had to have his pair specially imported from Canada at great expense. On returning to the UK, his wife had put her foot down and made him sell the Mirages in favour of some little Bose cubes. With a tear in his eye, he helped me load the van and we headed back up to Lincs.
Unpacked, the speakers were just beautiful - understated and elegant. Tall and wide but shallow black monoliths, they were quite obviously made with great attention to detail and with more than just an eye on sound quality.
Dimensions: 133 cm (H), 46 cmm (W), 21 cm (D) (in inches, that’s 52.5 x 18.1 x 8.3).
Weight: 61 kg (135 lbs).
It’s a three-way, ported loudspeaker with five drivers arranged front and back in a left and right handed configuration:
1 x 254 mm (10") carbon-filled polypropylene-cone woofer - front mounted.
2 x 127 mm (5”) carbon fiber/polypropylene-cone midrange drivers - one front and one rear mounted, connected in phase
2 x 25 mm (1”) titanium-dome, cloth suspension tweeters - one front and one rear mounted, connected in phase.
Drivers are all Mirage designs.
Crossover frequencies: 350Hz and 2kHz.
Frequency response: 30Hz–3kHz, ±2dB.
Impedance: 6 ohms nominal, 4 ohms minimum.
Sensitivity: 83dB at 2.83V (anechoic chamber at 1m). This seems low, but in fact I‘m told that it is misleading because the way this is measured means that it doesn’t truly reflect the output of the rear drivers. Certainly, I have never found them particularly hard to drive.
Speakers shown when they were in a different position, stood on the short axis of the room.
The cabinet is made from very thick mdf and there is a series of internal baffles made of 25mm mdf. If you do the knuckle test on them, all you get is sore knuckles! There are gloss black plinth, top piece and side cheeks. The top and bottom frame the full length cloth grille, which wraps around the front and rear baffle sides. The plinth is deeper than the cabinet and the solid all-metal binding posts are mounted on the rear, facing vertically upwards, just above ground level - they allow for bi-wiring or amping.
This is not my image - lifted from the web.
The idea of using drivers firing in different directions and taking advantage of the wall reflections isn’t new, by any means but it’s counter intuitive to many people when they consider what is and isn’t the ‘right way’ to make a loudspeaker. The Mirages need to be away from all walls to really do their stuff, so mine are placed on the long axis of the room, about a metre from the rear wall, perhaps 1.5 from the sides and widely spaced with a fair bit of toe-in. I use the two previously mentioned Mark Levinson amps, with the 100 watt ML-9 driving the bass and the 50 watt ML-11 driving the mid and treble.
I’ve had them for about ten years now and I’ve never really felt any desire to change them. The only thing I would like which I’d like that they don’t quite provide is the pin-point (to the millimetre) imaging that I’ve managed to get from some other speakers - all with narrower front baffles. The M-3si isn’t bad in this respect, it’s just that I know it can be done better. The bass from that 10 incher in a big cabinet is everything I need in this room - I can’t imagine there would be many people in the UK with rooms big enough to really need the top of the range M-1si model, which has all the drivers including the bass one doubled up - they’d need a house like an aircraft hanger. The star though, is that massive soundstage and if you thought a Gyrodec was good in this respect, you should try playing one into these speakers as I have been doing and you’ll see right away why I don’t want to change them.
Little and large!
Those vintage Levinson amps really were excellent as I recall, but didn't look as flash as Krells and never really got the exposure - I don't think the then importer got on with HFN from memory, despite being better at the time 
