MBL 101 Extreme loudspeakers

The exceedingly large, extremely heavy (better than a ton and a half), eight-chassis, twenty-six-driver, $263,000, omnidirectional MBL 101 X-tremes are, in almost every way possible, the best loudspeakers I’ve heard in my home—or anyplace else, for that matter. As true point sources (which is to say, literal pulsating spheres), they are capable of feats of sonic legerdemain that neither dipoles nor direct-radiating loudspeakers can match, chief among which is the trick of turning your listening space into a near life-sized diorama—an uncannily three-dimensional replica of the venue in which your music was recorded, of the artists who were performing in that space, and of the instruments on which they were playing—that seems less like it’s being generated in bits and pieces by membranes or cones and more like it’s been transported whole and complete from one place and moment in time to the here and now. It is a simply amazing feat of stereophonic magic that every high-end audio system aspires to but that only the X-tremes (in my experience) can bring off. To hear the way Ben Webster’s tenor sax and Gerry Mulligan’s bari (along with Jimmy Rowles’ piano, Mel Lewis’ drumkit, and Leroy Vinnegar’s standup bass) leap out at you in three dimensions on Billy Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge” (from AP’s Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster) —completely “there” in your room, only there within a soundfield that is manifestly not that of your room but of your room resized and blended with the acoustic of the studio venue in which this set was recorded way back in 1959—is to feel the time-machine chill that you only get when an approximation of musicians playing in a hall or a studio suddenly verges on the real thing.

How the 101 X-treme is capable of turning water into wine is a complex question that requires a complex answer. As I have reviewed this speaker once before—roughly a decade ago (celebrating its tenth anniversary is the occasion for this re-visit)—I will be drawing in part on what I’ve previously written, in part on what the 101 X-treme’s brilliant designer Jürgen Reis has shared with me, in part on what the late Siegfried Linkwitz, the highly influential audio engineer recently eulogized in TAS by my eloquent colleague Robert E. Greene, had to say about loudspeaker design and practice (Linkwitz was a great proponent of monopoles and dipoles), and in largest part, of course, on what I’m currently hearing from the newest iteration of these great transducers. I’ll try to keep things fresh, but if I repeat myself it’s because the best things about the 101 X-treme (and the operating principle it embodies) have not changed.

Why Omnidirectional Loudspeakers?
There was a time back in the late 60s and early 70s when omnidirectional loudspeakers were the audiophile rage. Of course, it was the much-maligned Bose 901s that chiefly spurred this craze, followed by a busload of three-sided, four-sided, and six-sided imitators. Though the Boses were not true omnis, which is to say they weren’t generating equal amounts of sonic energy in all directions at all frequencies, they did use the listening room, and particularly the wall behind them, in a way that most other loudspeakers of their day did not—and that acoustic instruments in concert halls always do.

You see, better than 70% of what we hear at a live event is not direct sound but indirect sound bounced off the walls, floor, and ceiling of the venue—reflected energy that profoundly affects the timbre, the dynamics, the durations, the imaging, the very character of the sonic presentation.