J. Valin : Feb 7th 2023
Just last year I had the pleasure of reviewing one of the best cone loudspeakers I’ve heard—the $78k, three-way, three-driver Estelon X Diamond Mk II. As luck would have it, I had the exact same experience this year, thanks to the Swiss company Stenheim.
Though also a three-way floorstander, Stenheim’s Alumine Five SE is otherwise quite different than Estelon’s X Diamond II. For one thing it has a hefty (220-pound!), damped aluminum chassis, where the Estelon’s is made of a hefty (190-pound!) slurry of acrylic and marble. For another, the Stenheim’s aluminum enclosure is shaped into a conventional rectangular box, unlike the Estelon’s fabulous, near-inaudible, hourglass-shaped one. For a third, the Alumine Five SE is modest in size—less than four-feet tall, one-foot wide, and a foot-and-a-quarter deep—where the Estelon is considerably taller, wider, and deeper. For a fourth, the Stenheim uses “old-fashioned” paper- and fabric-cone drivers (two slot-loaded 10″ woofers, one 6.5″ midrange, and one 1″ fabric-dome tweeter), once again unlike Estelon’s latter-day ceramic-sandwich and diamond Accutons.
On the surface, the Alumine Five SE looks like a chunky little schoolgirl, but, as I say in my review, it is actually a chunky little stick of dynamite. With a near-hornlike sensitivity of 94dB/1W/1m and a relatively stable 8-ohm impedance, the Alumine Five SE is capable of simply phenomenal dynamics—unexceeded in speed, power, and nuance by any cone speaker that I’ve reviewed, regardless of size, configuration, or price. When coupled with what may be the most extended, naturally colored, well-defined-in-pitch bass I’ve heard from a ported loudspeaker (only the Estelon contends), it’s explosively “alive”-sounding. From the low end (down to 30Hz) through the mid-treble, it is capable of dynamic swings that go from 0-to-60 in the blink of an eye. It is also simply gorgeous in tonality (just a little on the bottom-up side), minutely detailed, and unusually three-dimensional in imaging. There isn’t a thing about this phenomenal loudspeaker I don’t like. As was the case with the X Diamond Mk II, it is a standard-setter, only it doesn’t require quite as much square footage behind and around it as the larger Estelon does to perform its magic tricks.
If you listen in a smallish-to-medium-sized space and want the whole enchilada—and not just a taste—without compromise in speed, extension, beauty, resolution, and realism, I can’t think of another cone loudspeaker that will beat this one out. It not only wins one of my Golden Ear awards for 2022, but it will also certainly be my nominee for TAS’ 2022 Loudspeaker of the Year Award—indeed, for Overall Product of the Year.