Returning to Altre Follie, amongst the small group arrangements are a handful of solo tracks, including ‘Folias Gallegas’ by Santiago De Murcia and played by guitarist Rolf Lislevand. It perfectly encapsulates the strengths (and weaknesses) of the Minuet’s musical presentation. Unlike many a solo guitar recording, a genre much-beloved of audiophiles, this has none of the close-up detail, attack of plucked strings and micro-dynamic fireworks that make such discs standard demonstration fodder. Instead, you get a beautifully scaled musical ‘picture’ of player and instrument, seated in a natural acoustic, of a performance long on delicacy and instrumental harmonics, short on stark dynamics and sharp leading edges. This is all about what is being played, both in terms of the music and the instrument, less about how it’s being played. Present it is – reach out and touch it isn’t…
To a large extent, how you react to this presentation will shape your response to the Minuet. This isn’t the hyper-detailed, spot-lit immediacy of high-definition, high-resolution, high-end sound. If that is what you are looking for or what you are used to, there are many, many ways of achieving it and products only too happy to offer it. But there are surprisingly few that can offer the sheer coherence and fluid continuity of the Minuet.
Much of that spatial and rhythmic coherence depends on the Minuet’s extended bottom end. But that in turn depends on how much space you can afford behind and beside the speakers. I think you need a wall that’s at least 5.0m/16’ long against which to place them – and longer would be better. The good news is that nearfield listening is a very real possibility with these even tempered and tonally neutral speakers, meaning that placement to fire across a room is often going to be the preferred approach. Which brings you slap up against the other space limitation. To achieve optimum linearity and continuity from the bottom end you’ll need to allow more than 1.0m/4’ behind each speaker – and more would be better.
In other words, the Minuets are capable of remarkable performance, but to achieve it you need the right space, the right system and a rare set of installation skills. Even then, the presentation might not match your expectations and preferences.
So no, despite its consummate musical capabilities, the Minuet isn’t perfect. It lacks the astonishing transparency and dynamic discrimination of the Trio, the dynamic impact and substance of the Stenheim U2-SX or the natural tonality and instrumental body and textures of the Dragon Legacy. But all of those speakers cost considerably more than the Minuet. Yet, in value terms, perhaps the most interesting comparison is with its own closest relatives. At half the size and a third of the price of its monstrously impressive stablemate, the Auditorium, what does the Minuet give away in performance terms to its bigger brother? The Auditorium and Minuet share identical baffle materials and construction, from their aluminium frame work to the smoothly bevelled MDF skin and flawless paint finish. The large frontal area of the Minuet’s bass-mid driver is protected by the same horizontal aluminium slats used on the far larger Auditorium bass driver. The speakers’ base parts and adjustable feet are also essentially identical, although as mentioned in the installation notes, thankfully the square feet themselves are being replaced with circular ones, a solution which is aesthetically superior (otherwise all four, square feet inevitably end up sat at different angles) and also far more practical when it comes to calculating speaker position during the set-up phase. The diaphragms themselves and magnet structures are also shared between the two speakers, meaning that the two-way Minuet really is a three-way Auditorium writ small.
