IN MEMORIAM: MAGNEPAN’S JIM WINEY
Stereophile Staff
Jim Winey, founder and chief inventor/engineer of pioneering loudspeaker company Magnepan, died peacefully on January 10.
Born in 1934 and raised in Iowa, Winey—before becoming an engineer and multiple-patent-holding inventor of innovative loudspeakers featuring planar-magnetic technologies—was first a music lover. “Music’s pull was so strong that, by the time he entered his teens, Jim Winey insisted on experiencing it viscerally,” David Lander wrote in the January 2003 Stereophile.1
“I was probably 13, 14 years old,” Winey recalled. “I’d come home from school for lunch, and there was a program on every day that had classical music on it. After I had my lunch, I would sit with this portable radio of my sister’s in my lap, kind of pressed to my body so I could feel it as well as hear it.”
Lander’s interview discusses Winey’s love of electrostatic speakers—first Janszen Z-600s, later KLH Nines—which eventually inspired his planar-magnetic, ribbon tweeter, and quasi-ribbon designs including the first large-scale true-ribbon tweeter. His Magneplanar speakers use magnets to drive a large surface area of Mylar film.
Here’s how his planar-magnetic concept came to him, as he worked on a project at 3M. “I happened to be working on an application that involved laminating tape to flexible magnets. I must have been sitting there thinking about the project as well as my electrostatic project. I looked up and saw some perforated ceiling tiles, and the light bulb went on. It’s as simple as that.”
Customers prize Magnepan speakers for their open sound; lacking a cabinet, they lack cabinet colorations.
Winey also invented a tonearm, the Unitrac, a unipivot design, as he believed that the arm was often a system’s weak link. From conception to
