I’ll leave the aesthetics of the foot to the sensibilities of individual readers. As previously noted, they do tend to divide opinion. However, this is both a matter of taste and, once you’ve heard the contribution of the base, I suspect it’s a consideration that will be rendered largely irrelevant. For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a fan when I first saw the SX base attached to the speaker, but now I’m beginning to not only prefer the looks, but I’m finding it difficult to imagine the A5 without the base.
All told, the A5 is a thoughtful and well-executed revision of or extension to a highly-regarded existing model. But as in all such cases, the challenge is to build on the considerable strengths of the original without diluting them, undermining them or disturbing the inherent balance that makes the model worth building on in the first place. The audio world is littered with examples where the ‘upgraded’ model’s whole is rather less than the sum of the original’s parts…
Minerals!
The A5-SE is definitely a hard act to follow – as a lot of competing products have discovered. Thankfully, Stenheim has not suffered the same problem. The A5-SX not only retains the musical integrity, communicative capabilities and that uncanny ability to let the music and the performance breathe, it adds to them – significantly. The most obvious change is a new found clarity, speed and transparency in the bass. You’d never have described the A5-SE’s bass as tubby or overweight, but the SX brings authority, definition and attack to the lower registers, along with the control that allows that bass boost I mentioned above. It strips away a subtle yet attractive warmth from the 5’s nether regions, revealing the sort of definition and muscle you might expect from a sprinter’s hind-quarters – and the explosive dynamic power and instant response that goes with it.
The result is more space: more space within the enclosed acoustic; more space between and around instruments; more space between notes. Along with that space comes instrumental texture. Playing the Batiashvili/Shostakovich Violin Concerto No.1 (Salonen, SOBR, Echoes Of Time – DGG UCCG-52086) brings home he benefits. This isn’t one of DGG’s best recordings, with a dull overall balance and grainy presentation. The SX cuts through the murk to the brilliance of the performance itself. The timpani detonations are more clearly placed, with greater impact and a real sense of the skin’s vibration, the orchestral dynamics are more explosive, the double basses saw with greater weight and vigour. But that clarity extends upwards, investing the solo instrument with more focus, presence and body, Batiashvili’s playing with greater control when required, verve and agility when it’s allowed. You hear it in the extended, climbing lines of the Passacaglia, lines that teeter on the very edge of the instruments range; you hear it in the extraordinary speed, attack and rhythmic precision of her playing in the finale of the Fourth Movement. Play Barbirolli’s Sibelius 2 (with the RPO on Chesky CR3 – the best thing that label ever released!) and you’ll hear it in the opening bars of the Second Movement, the clarity with which the pizzicato moves from basses to celli and back again, the instruments effortlessly separated in tone and texture.
