Everyone who reads my loudspeaker reviews knows: I wish box speakers did not sound like box speakers. Plus! I wish all speakers sounded focused and transparent like LS3/5a’s or vintage Quads. I also want them to be uncompressed and play large, with window-shattering power and floor-shaking bass. And while I’m wishing . . . I’ll take a little glow and sparkle and voodoo magic as well.

Unfortunately, few loudspeakers do all that. And the ones that can cost crazy cash.

But there might be hope.

I have discovered a radically engineered floorstanding speaker that maybe, just maybe, does a lot of all that—for a lot less than crazy cash. That speaker is the Manger p1, manufactured in Mellrichstadt, Germany. It costs $14,995/pair to $18,995/pair, depending on finish.

The Manger sound transducer
1925: General Electric engineers Chester Rice and Edward Kellogg introduced their radical “Hornless Loudspeakers,” which featured a conical paper diaphragm attached to a coil of wire energized by a large magnet structure.

1968: Vexed by what he perceived as the inherent limitations of loudspeaker cones, Manger Audio’s founder, Josef Manger (1929–2016), began developing a new cone-less type of loudspeaker driver. His first finished design—a flat, low-mass, wide-bandwidth, multilayered, impregnated-textile disc—appeared in 1974. Manger described this membrane-like disc as “highly elastic in its plane but inelastic in bending.” (footnote 1) Unlike most loudspeaker drivers, the diaphragm of the Manger Sound Transducer (MST) does not operate pistonically. Instead, voice-coil excitations generate transverse waves along its flat surface, like ripples in a pond.

Manger described the goal of his research as “[minimizing] time-delaying energy storage during the transformation of the electrical form of energy into the mechanical form.” His daughter, Daniela Manger, who now serves as Manger Audio’s chief engineer and CEO, explained via email that “the rigidity of this thin flexible diaphragm decreases from the center to the outside at an equal ratio, similar to the basilar membrane in our ear. High frequencies expire quickly in the inner area of the membrane, while lower frequencies move concentrically to the edge; where they encounter a matched termination and, a star-shaped absorptive damper; which, prevent reflections from returning from the edge.”

The Manger website claims the MST’s bandwidth is 80Hz–40kHz, with a voltage sensitivity of 89dB/W/m and a rise time of 13µs. The website also suggests that the MST “represents a frequency-independent impedance for the driving force. . . . It behaves like an ohmic resistance in a power circuit.”

After pestering Daniela Manger to tell me exactly what the MST’s membrane is made of, she sent an explanation: “It is a three-layer sandwich, two very thin outer foils and in between there is a plastic with special properties. The recipe was developed by my father and we manufacture the plastics in our own factory.”

The Manger website describes another interesting Josef Manger innovation: a single voice-coil that is really “Two voice-coils (on one former), mounted mechanically in series and switched electrically in parallel.” According to Ms. Manger, this produces a long but “extremely light” 70-mm driving coil capable of ±3.5 mm of displacement, with a total weight of only 0.4 grams. Manger’s dual-coil voice- coil is energized by “no less than 15 neodymium magnets of only 0.95 mm width concentrating their magnetic field of 1.3 Tesla on an air gap of only 0.85mm width.” (footnote 2)

According to Ms. Manger, “My father realized about 50 years ago, that a musical instrument reproduced by a cone loudspeaker does not sound natural. The Manger driver was developed because he realized: the problem is not in the frequency domain but in the time domain.”

The Manger p1 loudspeaker
The current Manger lineup consists of three two-way floorstanding models: one active (the s1) and two passives (the p1 reviewed here and Manger’s flagship passive, the p2). The company also makes two standmount monitors, one active, one passive.

In the slender p1, the MST is loaded by an 8-liter sealed subenclosure and is crossed over at 360Hz to an 8″ carbon fiber/paper sandwich bass driver, residing in its own larger sealed enclosure. The p1 cabinet measures 44.8″ tall by 10.6″ wide by 8.4″ deep and weighs 61.7lb. It is available in an almost infinite variety of colors and finishes including various shades of matte or gloss finishes or wood veneer. My review samples were in a Makassar ebony matte finish.

Setup
When they arrived, I plunked the fresh-from-the-box but well-used Manger p1s in those spots where most loudspeakers sound the least boomy in my room: facing forward, about 7′ apart, and 30″ from the front wall. In that position, the p1s sounded smooth and well-focused, but there was a conspicuous, music-spoiling hole in the frequency response—right around 100Hz. Below 100Hz, bass was rolled off.

I sent a worried-sounding email asking Daniela Manger how she recommended positioning them.

“Our recommendation for setup is: The distance between speakers should be 9 feet maximum. The distance from the wall behind should be 2.3 feet or larger. It can be closer (however), as the speaker is sealed and tuned with a low Q, so the increase of bass with a closer distance works without getting boomy. Listening position can be very close as the Manger driver already radiates in far-field behaviors at around 0.45 feet. We recommend a toe-in with the drivers crossing about 1.6 feet in front of your listening position. This gives you a very precise three-dimensional image which is absolutely [stable].”

Daniela’s words gave me permission to move the p1s closer to the wall behind them. As I inched the speakers back, the bass region began to fill in. In my final position, with the speakers about 6′ apart and only 12″ from the cabinet-backs to the front wall, Frank Sinatra’s voice (LP, In The Wee Small Hours, Capitol W581) and Vladimir Horowitz’s piano (44.1 FLAC, Horowitz at Home, Deutsche Grammophon/Tidal) displayed their proper tone. My Stereophile test CD and trusty iPhone dB meter verified that 50Hz, 100Hz, 1kHz, and 5kHz were all reproduced at the same level.

The Manger p1s are equipped with double pairs of WBT next-gen binding posts and thus are biwirable and biampable. The majority of my listening was done biwired with AudioQuest Rocket 33 loudspeaker cables.

Listening with the Rogue Stereo 100
Because the Manger p1s are built in Germany, I assume they’ll play Bach and Beethoven—but when I think of Germany today, I think of Elektronische Musik: a genre that sounds especially good on giant horn speakers but is not as well-suited to those little British monitor speakers I use as references.

Since my art school days, I’ve been a fan of what Germans call kosmische musik (cosmic music) and the British call Krautrock. It’s an experimental art-music genre, inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen, that emerged from the student rebellions of the 1960s and is associated with groups like Can and Faust. Despite its avant-garde character, this music has remained popular and evolved into what I perceive as a sophisticated reimagining of German Romanticism. Typically, cosmic music consists of operatic sound collages featuring dense droning synthesizers, modified instrumental sounds, and myriad forms of circuitry-based sound-making technologies. Kosmische music is brainy and head-trippy.

Footnote 1: See mangeraudio.com/en/discover/about/acoustical-reality.

Footnote 2 See mangeraudio.com/en/discover/history.