Describing sound is tricky business.
Think about how you would describe silence, not the Cage 4’ 33” piece, to someone who’s never heard it. Tricky, right?
Reviewing loudspeakers is even more complicated because writing about how they sound, by necessity, means describing how the music they’re asked to reproduce makes us feel. After all, sound is all well and good but music is meant to move us beyond aural titillation. Listening to music as an activity worthy of our complete attention goes well beyond typical audiophile concerns of sound quality so one danger that lays in wait when writing about hifi gear is we can make this most important aspect of listening seem irrelevant. We can make this deeper connection to music all but disappear, replaced by an empty shell using words that focus on aspects of sound quality that have nothing to do with music.
Then there’s some hifi gear that sends you right to the heart of the matter—directly to the beating heart of music with nary a thought of midranges, soundstages, or silky smooth highs. And I am happy to report that the MC Audiotech TL-12 are exactly this kind of speaker.
North Wales, PA-based MC Audiotech’s hifi roots reach back into other hifi companies including Impact Audio, Linaeum, and Veloce Audio. I’m going to let Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt tell us about what was, back in 1997, a then new tweeter as found in the Lineaum Model 10 loudspeaker:
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a really new tweeter design. Only five basic types have ever been developed: cones, domes, panels, ribbons, and ionic plasmas. And the most recent of these—the long-defunct DuKane “blue-glow” Ionovac—was introduced 40 years ago. Since then, tweeter development has been more evolutionary than revolutionary, a series of refinements that has made them more efficient, more reliable, and smoother and more extended in response.
After 40 years of evolution, a new species of tweeter has appeared: the Linaeum TLS, which stands for True Line Source. This moniker refers to the Linaeum tweeter’s radiating source, which is essentially a very narrow vertical line. The driver itself falls into the familiar dynamic category, consisting of a coil suspended in a fixed magnetic field. What’s revolutionary about it is the diaphragm, which isn’t really a diaphragm at all, but a pair of curved, softly pliable ribbons.
This is relevant information because the MC Audiotech TL-12 in for review house the company’s Wide Band Line Source (WBLS) transducers that are a direct but improved descendant of the Linaeum TLS, a design patented in 1985 by creator Paul Paddock.
The TL-12 are a two-way design with three WBLS transducers in a dipole array per side covering 300Hz up to 22kHz which sit above a 12″ transmission-line woofer that reach down to 28Hz according to the company. The TL-12’s efficiency is rated at 93dB with an 8 Ohm nominal impedance (6.8 Ohm minimum impedance). Think amp friendly.
A single pair of binding posts are located on the inside sides of the TL-12’s curved backside making one speaker right and the other left. The speakers are supported by 4 IsoAcoustics GAIA footers.
The vertical slots on either side of the cabinets are there to allow the rear wave of energy of the device to evacuate through these openings. The WBLS transducers also offer very wide—60 degrees +/- 2dB—horizontal dispersion which translated into an extra wide sweet spot that easily covered the width of the B-Side’s comfy couch. The TL-12 measure approximately 48″ x 17″ x 23″ and weigh 118 lbs a piece and they’re very easy to move around thanks to the IsoAcoustic footers slide-ability. The review pair are wrapped in a lovely Hickory veneer, one of four ‘base finishes’. Upgraded veneers are available.
Mark Conti, MC Audiotech’s co-founder, drove the review up from North Wales, PA, just outside of Philly, where the company is based and helped set them up in Barn, a process that took all of about 10 minutes. In total. For their 6-week Barn stay, the TL-12 lived on the Barn’s B-Side and never moved an inch from the initial setup position because they sounded just right, right where they were.
From the MC Audiotech WBLS Transducer White paper:
Above is a general top view of this [WBLS Transducer] device. The flexible membranes are plastic about the thickness of paper. The wire loop bonded to the central area, interacting with the magnets driving the conjoined membrane from the center in the direction shown. The physical action sets up a wave motion in the membranes which radiates through the plastic expending their energy as sound. The origin is a WAVE LINE SOURCE. No other transducer realizes this heretofore theoretical ideal.
I’m kinda reluctant to spend too much time focusing on this unique transducer for fear readers will get fixated on it instead of the more important matter of how these speakers reproduce music. That said, I will share that this technology brought to mind ribbons and panels albeit in terms of aspects of sound qualities as opposed to pure mimesis. Or to put it another way, the TL-12 do not sound like Quad 57s or big full range ribbons but they do offer a similar kind of lovely in-room energy that seems completely apart from the speakers and if you lean in just right, music feels nearly like it’s being made inside your head. Luminous energy in air. Nice.
The TL-12 got to play with a number of amplifiers including the Barn-resident Leben CS-600X, Constellation Audio Inspiration Integrated 1.0 (review), and a short run with the recently reviewed, and stunning, Soulution 331 (review). Digital duties came courtesy of the recently reviewed Aurender A1000 (review) as well as the Auralic S1 (more info) with the Barn resident Mola Mola Tambaqui (review) and totaldac d1-untiy (review) DACs taking care of digital to analog conversion. All cabling and power was provided by AudioQuest and all of the gear sat comfortably on a Box Furniture MD3S rack (see full Barn and systems details).
In every way that counts, the time it took for me to fall into the music made by the MC Audiotech TL-12 was just a tad longer than setup time—mere minutes. My focus quickly shifted from ‘how do these speakers sound’ to ‘what do I want to hear next’ jubilance. Not only did that luminous energy in air quality delight my ears and brain, but the TL-12’s full-range performance perfectly served the music in play with a rich, rewarding presentation that felt at once effortless and authoritative. While each amplification partner worked wonders, I spent the most time using the Leben CS600X because it was my favorite. The Leben has a few magic tricks of its own including a rich lit up energy that made the TL-12 feel even more alive.
One of the first albums I listened to all the through with the TL-12 in action was Tamsin Elliott & Tarek Elazhary’s So Far We Have Come.
From the liner notes:
So Far We Have Come is the debut duo album from Tamsin Elliott (UK) and Tarek Elazhary (Egypt), two artists who have recognised in each other a commonality in their relationship to music. They are both practitioners and composers deeply embedded in their own living traditions, while also leading genre- bending bands (Solana, Dokkan). Through their friendship and ongoing collaboration they have unearthed a series of intriguing connections between English & Arabic folk idioms, and worked together to weave this affinity into a thrilling fusion of songs, tunes and textures.
This is all acoustic music in a worldly way with oud, lever harp, piano accordion, fiddle, viola, vocals and more and all of the unique sounds from these wildly varied instruments and voices felt like pure energy sources in air in Barn, hovering in space with their full range of sounds on display, feeling like sparkling energy but with real physical presence. Delightful with a sound image free from the speakers and as large and deep as the recording allowed. Again at the risk of placing too much emphasis on the TL-12’s unique Wide Band Line Source transducers I will share that acoustic string instruments as in evidence here rang out with such life-like clarity and resolution from note through decay that I remained consistently engaged and delighted throughout the review period. It never got old.
One potential hazard when it comes to spending time with speakers that offer unique qualities in reproduction is never getting beyond that difference toward a more meaningful appraisal. But I can say that extended and deep listening time with the TL-12 made it obvious that the unique qualities that initially struck me and stood out continued to make music that much more engaging, that much more delightful throughout the review period.
Krystian Zimerman’s way with Schubert’s Piano Sonatas D959 & D960 have been a source of heady pleasure since I first heard this record at RMAF 2018. Solo piano also offers a great workout for any hifi as it can uncover unwanted bumps and bruises. Now I know what some of you are wondering so I’ll hit that nail head-on—the TL-12 sound perfectly integrated from bottom to top and Krystian Zimerman’s piano was of one sonic piece. Seeing as the crossover point between those WBLS transducers and the 12” woofers sits within spitting distance of middle C on the keys, any lack of coherence would have been highlighted by this highly recommended music. Of course it would have been obvious with any music that dips below 300Hz but I wanted to use a paired down musical example to emphasize the point.
The TL-12 playing Schubert’s Piano Sonatas also reinforced their expert way with strike, note, and decay as the unique sounds Zimerman expertly coaxes from his custom-made piano lit up the Barn with live-like energy, equally convincing in tone, texture, and force. Moving.
From a review of this album in The Guardian:
To recreate something of the sound world that Schubert would have known, Zimerman used a tailor-made piano, replacing the standard Steinway keyboard and action with one he designed and made himself. The hammers strike the strings at a different point, creating a new set of overtones and hence a different range of keyboard colours, and the action becomes lighter too. (Played on a modern grand, he says, “the many repeated notes in Schubert could turn into Prokofiev.”)
I love a good Prokofiev joke.
FACS Wish Defense, released in February on Troubled Minds, has become a recent favorite for its angular uneasy energy. The band is Noah Leger on drums and percussion, Jonathan Van Herik on bass, acoustic guitar, and Bass VI, and Brian Case on guitar, vocals, and keyboards. A classic three-piece with more than its fair share of drive and attitude. This music helped highlight the TL-12’s punchy dynamic oomph! that hit as hard and as convincingly as the music demanded. Overall, I would also call the TL-12 a fast sounding speaker in the best way as it easily kept pace with even raucous post-punk energy.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again in this context—to my mind there’s no such thing as a good speaker that’s only good at a certain type of music. While I’ve emphasized the TL-12’s excellence when it comes to reproducing acoustic music, they are equally adept at hard electric crush.
As well as on soft atmospheres as found on Christian Fennesz’s latest Mosaic, released on Touch last December.
From the liner notes:
Fennesz experiments with unusual time signatures. It’s not obvious, but ‘Love and the Framed Insects’ is in 7/4. ‘Personare’ is somehow influenced by West African pop music from the 1980s. ‘Goniorizon’ originally consisted of six hard rock guitar riffs mixed on top of one another. Then it became this ‘thing’ that somehow opened possibilities for new things to come… all this adds up to a filmic, highly involving and beautiful score of diverse influences and multiple possibilities to be explored by the listener.
The sounds coming out of Mosaic are largely made from processed guitar but they make otherworldly sounds in Fennesz’s more than capable hands. Guitar harmonics sound otherworldly even on acoustic guitar but here Fennesz turns them into all manner of sounds and beings including bells, sighs, and angels. Mosaic is in some ways a paired down album where silences become a key element as does space and the TL-12’s proved to be expert in conveying the smallest shifts in tone and texture, the silences between the notes, and the bigger atmospheric picture.
In terms of roughly similarly-priced speakers, the Volti Audio Rival Special Edition (review), Zu Audio Definition 6 (review), and more recently the Gauder Akustik Capello 100 (review) all come to mind and I couldn’t think of a more perfect grouping to illustrate the beautiful fun fact that there’s no single right way to approach loudspeaker design. I would also suggest that due to the TL-12’s unique presentation, direct comparisons to dissimilar speakers is a fool’s errand akin to comparing a white Bordeaux with an oboe. Or to put it in simpler terms, if you’re deciding between any of these speakers, or any others, the only way you’ll know which presentation suits you best is to hear ‘em. Ideally my words can serve as a sieve to help narrow down contenders.
As you may have noticed, reviews have been a bit scarce of late due to a number of reasons I won’t go into here. All to say, I’ve had a lot of time to focus on the TL-12 during their Barn visit. On many occasions I listened throughout the day and well into the evening, going from one album to the next to the next and so on. Easily dozens of albums, some more than once, in addition to dozens of ‘Test Tracks’ or songs I’ve used for years, some for decades, to listen for this or that aspect of reproduction. Not sounds, but moods and emotions triggered by favorite moving music. If we stick with the notion of a test, I’d give the TL-12 an A+.
Living with the MC Audiotech TL-12 proved to be an adventure in music, not a survey of sounds. To my way of thinking this is very high praise and the TL-12 certainly deserve my highest for their truly engaging full-range appeal coupled with that unique luminous energy that transformed listening into meaningful musical engagement. Highly recommended.
MC Audiotech TL-12 Loudspeakers
Price: starts at $28,000/pair in base veneers
Company Website: MC Audiotech
Finishs
Base Veneers: Walnut, Chestnut, Hickory, Ash
Upcharge Veneers: Gloss Black, Gloss White, Rosewood, Ribbon Makore
Call for additional finish options
Size and Weight
Boxed Weight 137 Lbs
Net Weight 117 Lbs
Height 48”
Width 17”
Depth 23.75”
Technical Details
Three proprietary Wide Band Line Source Driver “WBLS”
Open Baffle From 300 Hertz and up
Transmission Line Loaded 12” Woofer
Crossover Point 300 Hertz
Efficiency 93 dB
First Order Crossover Network
120 degree horizontal dispersion +/- 2.5 dB
Frequency Response 28Hz to 22kHz
Nominal Impedance 8 Ohm (minimum Impedance 6.8 Ohm)
Recommended amplifier power 25W – 500W