That ability to set up and then people a sound-stage even extends to the towering opening of Mahler’s 3rd (an MTT/SFSO live concert recording from 2002, SFS Media 821936-0045-2). The recording sets the stage wide but relatively shallow and that’s reflected by the A2’s presentation. Once again, the acoustic expands way beyond the speakers, while the orchestra and in particular, the slightly thuddy tuning of the timps is unmistakably the MTT version of the SFSO. But the little Stenheim is equally at home on the expansive, layered soundscapes of ‘Mercy Street’ (Peter Gabriel, So, PGLP07) while the motive presence and sheer energy of ‘Sledgehammer’ is seriously impressive. These speakers don’t just go big. Give them the power and they’ll go loud too – and it takes less power than you might think. Sure, the 585 and S-200 drove them to crazy levels, but the little JA30s – all 25 Watts of them – went astonishingly loud without losing their grace and poise. Remember, this is a speaker that’s both seriously dynamic and let’s the music breathe. Don’t go assuming this is a little speaker for low-level listening. It likes nothing more than getting up to get down!
It’s a learning curve…
Speaker designers wanting to understand the relationship between bandwidth, bass weight and musicality would do well to listen to the Alumine 2. Like any small cabinet, it has limited bottom-end extension, but the bass it does have is clean, uncluttered, beautifully textured and tuneful. Combined with its overall musical coherence, easy sense of substance and dynamics – especially through the mid-bass – it’s able to deliver a far more convincing, emphatic and involving performance than many speakers at this or higher prices, with more bandwidth and more apparent bass. It’s a one speaker proof of the audio law that states, bad bass is worse than no bass at all. What the A2 gives you is superb bass – down to a point. It’s amazing how easy that makes it to fill in the gaps.
This is what sets the Alumine 2 above the competition – and why it should be considered as a serious alternative to the majority of sub-20K floorstanders. It does the traditional, small-speaker things exceptionally well, but its fundamentally sorted design means that its musical grasp extends to recordings you might think would be well outside its capabilities. It’s natural sense of scale, the clarity it possess down to the bottom of its range and the ability it has to expand without constraint allow even the largest works to breathe naturally, the most propulsive rock music to hit hard. It does the small stuff better than the stand-mount competition; it does the big stuff better than any cheap (and all but a very few mid-priced) floorstanders. It works brilliantly in small spaces and astonishingly well in larger ones. You can tailor its strengths through amplifier choice: the Jadis JA30 is effortlessly intimate; the Gryphon Diablo 120 has real drive, energy and involvement; the Levinson 585 brings calm stability and expansive scale; the VTL S-200 bridges the gap between all three. And that’s the point. Not only is the Stenheim happy to play with pretty much any amplifier, it’s inherent voice and character is so natural that it’s the amplifier that gets to call the musical shots.
