Stenheim Alumine Two SE

The Alumine Two Where it all started for Stenheim. Your first listen will tell you that the Alumine Two is no ordinary compact, two-way loudspeaker – but your first glance won’t reveal why that is. You need to look a lot deeper – the same way Stenheim looked at loudspeaker design. Outwardly simple, even plain, there is much more to the Alumine Two than meets the eye. This speaker is an impressively musical product – but it is also proof of concept. At Stenheim, we started out by questioning the fundamental thinking, technological choices, and materials behind conventional designs. That led us to some surprising conclusions – answers that contradicted conventional thinking and fashionable theory: Solutions that: discarded the measured benefits of high-tech cone materials in favour of the musical advantages of more traditional approaches mandated low-loss, phase-coherent crossovers with sophisticated out-of-band roll-offs selected the low-storage signature of a critically damped aluminium cabinet using innovative, low-volume damping materials. And behind each decision? The drive to maintain the life and energy in the music, the essence of the original performance. That’s all very well in theory, but we had to demonstrate it in practice. So was born the Alumine Two, a little speaker that sounds much bigger than it looks. A speaker that, despite its compact dimensions embodies all our fundamental design principles:     A larger than expected bass-mid driver with a sophisticated, treated paper cone. A fabric dome tweeter, carefully horn loaded for increased efficiency. A high order, phase-coherent crossover to preserve the fragile but all-important temporal and spatial information in the stereo signal. A thin-wall aluminium cabinet built with hidden fixings and golden ratio dimensions. Low-volume damping materials to kill cabinet resonance and internal standing waves without killing musical dynamics. The results exceeded our wildest expectations and continue to shock and beguile listeners to this day. The thin-wall cabinet with its inherently low resonant signature maximises the internal volume. In terms of the enclosed air, the Alumine Two is literally bigger than it seems – at least compared to thick-wall, wooden cabinets. Add to that the classical combination of a reflex-loaded, 6.5” bass-mid and 1” soft-dome tweeter and you have a system that is both more efficient and wider bandwidth than you expect. Further extend the system sensitivity with subtle horn loading and a low-loss crossover and the loudspeaker becomes more responsive to input, not just translating more of the signal into musical energy, but giving the amplifier an easier job too, removing another potential bottleneck in the signal path.     The Alumine Two will bring your recordings to life, allowing the music and the musicians to breathe. It matches the expressive and dynamic demands of their performance, its scale, presence and intimacy. It offers all the advantages of a small speaker, combined with many of the benefits that come from a larger cabinet. Its rigid, critically-damped enclosure is inherently low colouration. Its overall efficiency makes the most of the incoming signal, preserving its energy and drama. Its combination of traditional but highly developed drivers with an exactingly executed cabinet constructed using the latest technology and materials strikes the perfect musical balance. With its classical proportions and tough yet flawless finish, the Alumine Two blends seamlessly with both traditional and modern surroundings. Expressive, engaging, bold, delicate, dramatic and astonishingly versatile, it will breathe life into your recordings and music into your home.   Special edition SE   The Alumine Two is also available as a Special Edition, the Alumine Two SE. For this model we use the same cabinet and drivers but paired with a cost-no-object crossover, upgraded (or custom) internal wiring and upgraded binding posts. For the Alumine Two we developed the lightest-touch, lowest loss crossover topology possible, but even so, improving the components has a profound effect on performance. Exhaustive listening tests have led us to develop our own internal wiring and select the very best parts from Mundorf and Jantzen, Audyn, Myflex and Jupiter – a Who’s Who of boutique audiophile brands. The result is even greater transparency and dimensionality, even more natural separation and perspectives, micro-dynamic and harmonic resolution, a greater range of tonal colour. The result is, more music, more musician and less speaker, creating what we firmly believe to be the most musically convincing compact speaker available.   Technical specifications Passive 2 ways with front Bass Reflex Design : 10 to 15 mm thick all aluminium construction Frequency response : 45Hz – 30kHz Power handling : 100W IEC, 200 W (peak) Recommended amplifier from 10W to 200W Sensivity : 93 dB SPL/2.83V/1m (measured in a semi-reverberant room) SPL max : 109 dB Nominal impedance : 4 Ohms Dimensions : H 330mm x W 230mm x D 275mm ( H 13in x W 9in x D 11in) Weight : 17 Kg each Woofer: One 16.51 cm (6.5in) High-strength cellulose fiber cone impregnated and coated on both sides with damped resins Tweeter : One 2.54cm (1in) Fabric dome, loaded by a small horn machined in the 15 mm aluminium front plate Air core inductors, Polypropylene capacitors, Metal film resistors Special finitions on demand : Light shiny Grey, Dark shiny grey, Full Black, Wood veneer or Leather veneer Special Edition SE with ultimate components (crossover, internal wiring and connectors) Warranty : 5 years   Press reviews ALUMINE TWO SE : SMALL WONDER… “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.” GY8 Magazine, Roy Gregory, avril 2023   TONE AUDIO MAGAZINE : THE STENHEIM ALUMINE 2 SPEAKERS “The all-aluminum enclosure is beautiful to behold, and the level of execution is terrific. If the concept, and all the benefits that come with a high-performance two-way monitor appeal to you, Stenheim’s Alumine 2 speakers are fantastic. They offer excellent sound, meticulous execution, and a density of thought approached by very few similarly priced speakers. Highly recommended." Tone Audio Magazine, Jeff Dorgay, July 2021