The purpose of any monitor is, quite literally, to hear what is going on: to hear the individual parts and be able to isolate them. The challenge is to allow that while still maintaining a sense of the whole, or how those parts fit together. In many ways, the formal, stylised structures and rigid relationships of baroque music play perfectly to the Signature’s strengths. Because the overall form is a given, the degree of immediacy and micro-dynamic discrimination delivered by the speakers allows the listener to really appreciate the intricacies and precision in both the structure and the playing.
You can take this even further. Shostakovich might not be the obvious candidate to sit alongside Vivaldi, but the Passacaglia from his 1stViolin Concerto, with its demanding scoring and extended, solo evolution is the perfect subject for almost microscopic scrutiny. Alina Ibragimova’s playing (with Jurowski and the State Academic S.O. of Russia, Hyperion CDA68313) in this most concentrated of passages is a model of focussed intensity. With her reputation as a chamber player I approached this disc with some scepticism, but the power of her vision overcomes any weakness in the power of her bowing. She may be no Batiashvili, but the Stenheims’ ability to reveal the subtleties of bow speed and pressure lays bare the tension between the duration of the notes and their spacing. Each step, skip or turn in the jaggedly extending solo line takes on an almost inevitable momentum as the music climbs in pitch and concentrated power until it bursts into the explosive opening of the final movement. The Signatures put you up close and personal, in the same space and with direct access to Ibragimova and her instrument. They capture both her technique and the way it drives the musical path she treads. The note-to-note definition and insight is exceptional – but it also imposes its own price on performance.
Put up or shut up…
In many ways, and in complete contrast to the 5 or 5SE, this is one of the most demanding speakers with which I’ve worked. The stock models have that wonderful ability to sound good anywhere. You plonk them down and they deliver straight off the bat. Then you start working with them and they just get better and better the more precisely you dial them in, balancing their overall sense of musical life and vitality against the enthusiastic mid-bass and lower-frequency weight and energy they are all too happy to generate. Try that with the signatures and they bite the hand that places them. In this case, at first blush they are likely to sound small and thin – the antithesis of what anybody familiar with the 5 might expect. In shifting position you are looking to load the bass rather than minimize it, to add weight and substance rather than controlling it. This isn’t so much a shift in voicing as a complete switch in personality, one that reflects the emphasis on clarity and transparency over more holistic qualities. But it’s also reveals more about the speaker than just its chosen voicing. This is a design where you take liberties at your peril and which will punish you for any shortcuts or omissions when it comes to set up. Example? The Alumine 5s possess one of the best and most easily adjusted spiking arrangements I’ve come across, a combination of stainless steel hardware and the tools to adjust it making attitudinal adjustment of the speaker child’s play. Which is just as well! The significant mass of the 5 Signature makes lifting/tilting them, or hand adjusting the spikes difficult if not impossible. But more importantly, if you get the speakers’ height off the floor, rake angle or azimuth wrong – you hear it all too clearly. If you get the spikes unevenly loaded – you hear it all too clearly. If you leave one of the locking collars even slightly loose – you’ll hear that all too clearly too! There is little or no margin for error here, although that should come as little surprise given the astonishing musical precision of which the speakers are capable.
