This is a review, listening tests, EQ and detailed measurements of the MAG Theatron M12-C center speaker. It was kindly drop shipped to me by a member and costs US $2,299.
As you probably can tell, this is a very large speaker. I can imagine it has to be mounted behind a projection screen. The woofer is inset, likely as an attempt to "time align" it with the very deep tweeter (or is it to control its directivity?). Oddly the speaker terminals are on top and are the screw kind. Don't usually see that for speakers aimed for home applications.
Here are the specs:
MAG Theatron M12-C Speaker Measurements
Let's start with our anechoic measurements performed using Klippel Near-field Scanner:
We see a rather rough response from the woofer and wavy one from tweeter. This is also a large discontinuity in the directivity around 700 Hz. We can get clues as to source of these problems by measuring each driver near-field:
Is that edge diffraction starting at 800 Hz and going past 1 kHz? Tweeter response is uneven as we have seen in our anechoic far field measurements. And ends in sharp resonance. Put another way, simple, non-anechoic measurements would have shown the issues here and clearly so in just a couple of minutes.
Back to the anechoic measurements, we see very high sensitivity of 95 dB.
Despite deploying 12 inch woofer in a rather large enclosure, bass extension is rather poor. Response starts to drop off 120 Hz with 50 Hz for F10. This is kind of bookshelf speaker response.
Early window response is some of the worst I have seen:
But do note that flush mounting changes this some. Predicted in-room response, non-flush mount naturally doesn't look good:
I was surprised at the very narrow directivity for a center speaker:
You better sit pretty far if you want to have sofa-wide even response. We also see what could be diffraction around 700 Hz yet again.
Vertical dispersion is usually not good in 2-way speakers and here, it is worse due to narrowing directivity:
The 12 inch driver allows quite high SPL levels. I only started to detect audible distortion at 106 dBSPL during sweeps (with hearing protection). Linearity is lost though pretty early on:
In an ideal speaker, distortion would remain constant and all the lines would be on top of each other. While we could tolerate fair bit of distortion in bass, this speaker brings plenty of it from 700 Hz on.
MAG Theatron M12-C Listening Tests and Equalization
Initial impression was that of upper bass warmth. But as soon as the first female vocal arrived, the sound was just odd to me. So decided to create some filters and boy was this a long journey:
The response is quite rough in bass so I focused only on larger variations in treble. Once there, overall response was more open without being too sharp. But lacked bass. With or without EQ, my deep bass tracks barely produced anything. And what it did produce was distorted to some extent. So I bumped up the response with that 80 Hz filter. That nicely evened out the response with EQ sounding quite a bit better than without.
Speaker was indeed sensitive. It delivered 10 dB better response than equiv. testing on other speakers with my amp. I still cranked it up.
And then would be startled with some dynamics in the music. So the benefit of high sensitivity is there.
I tested the directivity at near field. Response does drop off rapidly with horizontal angle.
Conclusions
From my vantage point, this is a PA speaker with its proper application being larger spaces, no home listening spaces. Narrow directivity points to that as does high sensitivity. As with many PA devices, sensitivity is everything. Refinement only has to be adequate. We maybe have that. If this speaker was $800, we could stop here and say job is done but the price is home speaker category. Here, we expect at least some attention paid to obvious sources of distortion and acoustic faults. Thank heavens we have EQ so we can correct for half the problem.
I can't recommend the MAG Theatron M12-C center speaker. It is just too compromised as a design and especially for the price.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
As you probably can tell, this is a very large speaker. I can imagine it has to be mounted behind a projection screen. The woofer is inset, likely as an attempt to "time align" it with the very deep tweeter (or is it to control its directivity?). Oddly the speaker terminals are on top and are the screw kind. Don't usually see that for speakers aimed for home applications.
Here are the specs:
MAG Theatron M12-C Speaker Measurements
Let's start with our anechoic measurements performed using Klippel Near-field Scanner:
We see a rather rough response from the woofer and wavy one from tweeter. This is also a large discontinuity in the directivity around 700 Hz. We can get clues as to source of these problems by measuring each driver near-field:
Is that edge diffraction starting at 800 Hz and going past 1 kHz? Tweeter response is uneven as we have seen in our anechoic far field measurements. And ends in sharp resonance. Put another way, simple, non-anechoic measurements would have shown the issues here and clearly so in just a couple of minutes.
Back to the anechoic measurements, we see very high sensitivity of 95 dB.
Despite deploying 12 inch woofer in a rather large enclosure, bass extension is rather poor. Response starts to drop off 120 Hz with 50 Hz for F10. This is kind of bookshelf speaker response.
Early window response is some of the worst I have seen:
But do note that flush mounting changes this some. Predicted in-room response, non-flush mount naturally doesn't look good:
I was surprised at the very narrow directivity for a center speaker:
You better sit pretty far if you want to have sofa-wide even response. We also see what could be diffraction around 700 Hz yet again.
Vertical dispersion is usually not good in 2-way speakers and here, it is worse due to narrowing directivity:
The 12 inch driver allows quite high SPL levels. I only started to detect audible distortion at 106 dBSPL during sweeps (with hearing protection). Linearity is lost though pretty early on:
In an ideal speaker, distortion would remain constant and all the lines would be on top of each other. While we could tolerate fair bit of distortion in bass, this speaker brings plenty of it from 700 Hz on.
MAG Theatron M12-C Listening Tests and Equalization
Initial impression was that of upper bass warmth. But as soon as the first female vocal arrived, the sound was just odd to me. So decided to create some filters and boy was this a long journey:
The response is quite rough in bass so I focused only on larger variations in treble. Once there, overall response was more open without being too sharp. But lacked bass. With or without EQ, my deep bass tracks barely produced anything. And what it did produce was distorted to some extent. So I bumped up the response with that 80 Hz filter. That nicely evened out the response with EQ sounding quite a bit better than without.
Speaker was indeed sensitive. It delivered 10 dB better response than equiv. testing on other speakers with my amp. I still cranked it up.
And then would be startled with some dynamics in the music. So the benefit of high sensitivity is there.I tested the directivity at near field. Response does drop off rapidly with horizontal angle.
Conclusions
From my vantage point, this is a PA speaker with its proper application being larger spaces, no home listening spaces. Narrow directivity points to that as does high sensitivity. As with many PA devices, sensitivity is everything. Refinement only has to be adequate. We maybe have that. If this speaker was $800, we could stop here and say job is done but the price is home speaker category. Here, we expect at least some attention paid to obvious sources of distortion and acoustic faults. Thank heavens we have EQ so we can correct for half the problem.
I can't recommend the MAG Theatron M12-C center speaker. It is just too compromised as a design and especially for the price.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
That in itself is the best thing about this test. This time a rather bad speaker but next time maybe you test a good large speaker. 
