The 120 MKII System

The third Radialstrahler in the room, and the one sized for a real living room. The 120 MKII is a compact three-way on a dedicated stand — the same 360-degree radial tweeter and midrange as its larger siblings, with a pair of 6.5-inch aluminium bass drivers in push-push arrangement reaching down to 61 Hz. MBL designs it for rooms up to roughly 35 square metres, which is to say most rooms.

What drives it is not scaled down to match. The 9008 A is the Reference Line's core power amplifier — the same monoblock working across the room on the 101 X-Treme. Its first 50 watts are pure Class A before it transitions to Class AB, sixteen output devices deliver 840 watts into 4 ohms, and a second switchable toroidal transformer lets the amplifier be tuned to the loudspeaker and the room rather than left at one setting.

The Dan D'Agostino Pendulum sits in the same rack — the newest program in the D'Agostino line and the entry point to the marque, carrying the re-engineered JFET input topology from the Momentum C2 preamplifier. Hearing the smallest Radialstrahler on amplification of this class is the point of the pairing: it shows how much of MBL's character lives in the driver itself rather than in the scale of the system built around it.