Description
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: That mandated low-loss, phase-coherent crossovers with sophisticated out-of-band roll-offs: That 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:
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A larger than expected bass-mid driver with a sophisticated, treated paper cone.
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A fabric dome tweeter, carefully horn loaded for increased efficiency.
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A high order, phase-coherent crossover to preserve the fragile but all-important temporal and spatial information in the stereo signal.
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A thin-wall aluminium cabinet built with hidden fixings and golden ratio dimensions.
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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.
