The ultimate in performance delivery

What happens if you take the thinking and technology behind the Alumine speakers and apply it without consideration of cost or domestic constraints? What happens if you take the performance advantages inherent in the materials and components and maximize every aspect of that performance? What happens is the Reference Ultime line, a range of speakers without compromise and without peer.

The Stenheim Reference speakers are far larger than their Alumine cousins. They are far heavier too. In fact, they are larger in every sense, with bigger drivers, more of them, a more complex cabinet construction with more material and more topological options, from conventional single-wired connection all the way, by stages, to hybrid-active operation. 

Why? Because size matters…

The Alumine series sets new standards of performance – for speakers of its size. It does it by using thin-wall, aluminium cabinet construction that’s braced and uses sophisticated low-volume damping materials to create the largest possible enclosed volume from a cabinet of given external dimensions. It delivers cabinets with superior mechanical characteristics. It delivers a balance of greater efficiency and an easier load, wider bandwidth and uncompressed dynamics that the competition can’t match – for speakers of their size. Just like the best-ever middleweight boxer, they might be the best pound-for-pound fighters ever. But you still wouldn’t put them up against the best heavyweights…

Building bigger means that the Reference Ultime speakers can offer even wider bandwidth and greater efficiency, full-range performance in speakers with the sensitivity and agility to reproduce the smallest musical and rhythmic nuance, the tiny, intimate details that bring the performance to life, that reveal the full range of artistic expression. At the same time, unconstrained dynamic response delivers musical drama and impact, the wide bandwidth recreates a believably scaled and dimensioned images of the original event, capturing the acoustic space in which that performance happened.

But building bigger presents its own challenges. Larger cabinet panels require greater bracing and more critical damping. More drivers and wider bandwidth means more crossover and the risks to musical coherence that entails. Deeper bass presents its own challenges once the speakers are in real systems and real rooms. The Reference Ultime models represent the sum total of Stenheim’s knowledge and experience, embodied in products that embrace not just technology and the promise of performance, but the practicality and reality of realising that performance.

The Reference Ultime speakers employ symmetrical, D’Appolito driver arrays, ensuring seamless integration despite the number and size of the drivers they use. Those drivers share the same enhanced, organically-based diaphragm materials and although we use multiple drivers, the number of different driver types used is kept to the absolute minimum. For example, although each Ultime 3 speaker employs seven drivers (and a super tweeter), having only three different drivers (four bass, two mid and a tweeter) makes for a far more coherent and seamlessly integrated system. Together with the gentle slopes our drivers allow, that keeps the crossover electrically simple, creating an easily controlled load for the driving amplifier.

Each driver also enjoys its own mechanically and acoustically optimized enclosure, maximising driver performance and minimizing cabinet signature. Bass loading is defined by the operational constraints under which each design is intended to operate: so the Reference Ultime Two employs sophisticated slot porting, suitable to its smaller cabinet, single pair of bass drivers and use in smaller spaces. The Reference Ultime Three, with twice as many drivers, can place them in sealed enclosures, maximising weight and extension in larger spaces and away from boundary reinforcement. Both speakers offer passive bass compensation. In addition, the Reference Ultime Three benefits from the option of a configurable active drive for its low-frequency output. Even their massive, conical feet contribute directly to their adaptability and in-room tuning, with three different height ranges giving precise control of cabinet grounding, attitude and elevation.

Yet despite their massive internal construction and weight, their wide bandwidth and their unconstrained power and dynamic range, the Reference Ultime speakers are still more compact, their simple classical proportions less intrusive and more pleasing to the eye than the brutal, mechanistic or ostentatious appearance of so many high-end speakers. 

These are speakers that don’t just promise performance on paper, they deliver it in the real world, on the end of real systems. 

These are speakers that finally create the missing link between the electrical signals in your amplifiers and living, breathing music in your room.