The Stenheim Alumine 2 sits towards the smaller end of the scale, when it comes to medium-sized stand-mounts. 330mm/13” tall, they are 230mm/9” wide and 275mm/11” deep, although those dimensions are deceptive. Stenheim makes a big thing of their speakers being bigger than they look. What they’re referring to is the internal volume enclosed by the thin-wall cabinet – a volume that is much greater than an equivalently sized wood-walled enclosure. Do the sums and the relative volumes will surprise you. It’s something that Wilson-Benesch amongst others have also pointed out and it really is a thing. It helps explain why the A2 sounds so much bigger than it looks – and why it breathes so easily – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The drivers are modern versions of the traditional paper cone/soft dome pairing. The bass-mid unit uses a resin coated and impregnated cellulose fibre cone. At 165mm/6.5” it’s slightly smaller than the 8” driver I’d like to see, but still larger than today’s norm. The tweeter is a 25mm coated silk dome, set in a shallow horn machined into the front baffle to increase its sensitivity. Both drivers are rear mounted and as well as the tweeter horn, the baffle is carefully profiled around the bass-mid unit and front-firing reflex port, resulting in an unusually clean, uncluttered appearance. The drivers are vertically arranged but offset on the baffle, with the speakers designated for right and left placement. The cabinet is available in (an incredibly tough) light or dark grey, epoxy-paint finish as standard, with gloss grey, black, wood and leather veneers as options.
The crossover uses a phase-coherent, second order Linkwitz-Riley topology, a light-touch option that still succeeds in reducing out-of-band artefacts. The review samples were SE models, with upgraded crossover components, internal cabling and connectors, changes that bring significant advantages in terms of instrumental colour and texture, dynamic response and musical flow. Stenheim offer an SE option on all their Alumine models and in every case, the benefits are musically important enough to render the increase in cost trivial. The low-loss approach to crossover, cabinet construction and damping certainly pays dividends and the resulting numbers are encouraging. Stenheim claim a bandwidth of 45Hz to 30kHz (although I suspect those accord to ±6dB limits), nominal 8Ω impedance with a non-reactive load and 93dB in-room sensitivity. Those numbers alone suggest serious performance potential. More importantly, it suggests serious performance potential with less than the highest-end/highest-powered amplification.
Now think back to where we started. The popularity of the medium-sized stand-mount rested on its ability to deliver enough bandwidth to satisfy (without the cabinet or room getting in the way) from a speaker that the relatively modest amplifiers of the day could handle. Scroll forward to today and insert the A2’s characteristics into that equation. It’s got a better-behaved box, a bit more bandwidth, more sensitivity and still offers a benign load. Suddenly, the possibility of building a musically potent system without totally breaking the budget becomes a reality. What’s more, it’s a system that will work in smaller spaces and that needn’t give much away to bigger systems when it comes to midrange quality and musical coherence. It’s a situation that’s tailor made for low-powered, high-quality amplifiers, tube or solid-state, if that’s the way you want to go. But equally, it’s a shoo-in for the various high-quality integrateds that litter the market. With that in mind I hooked up the A2s to a range of partnering amplification – both in terms of price and power. Everything from the Icon Audio Stereo 20PP (less than a grand, less than 20 Watts) to the CH Precision I1, the Levinson 585 to the Jadis JA30, the Konus Audio Integrale 2000 to the VTL S-200.
