Listening to music
Straight out of their flight cases, the Alumine Two.Fives sounded bright. The manual recommends 200–300 hours of break-in, but the treble balance became more neutral after only a few days of casual listening. (The review samples had been previously used at a hi-fi show, so I figured that they already had plenty of hours on them.) Nevertheless, while the Stenheim's midrange was impressively uncolored, its low-treble balance was not an optimal match with the Ayre preamplifier, which itself sounds somewhat forward. So I performed all my critical auditioning with the MBL processor connected directly to the power amplifiers.
Once the speakers had settled in, the first thing I noticed was that at the MBL's usual volume control settings they played considerably louder than the MoFi, GoldenEar, and KEF speakers with which I had been living before the Stenheims arrived, an indication of the Stenheims' high sensitivity. The second thing I noticed was that the Alumine Two.Fives loved woman singers. The album heroes in the seaweed has been in constant rotation since its producer, David Chesky, let me know in January about this new release on his label, The Audiophile Society. David had written in an email that he feels like we're living in an age of hyped-up albums with exaggerated top ends and compression, where many people have no idea what real music actually sounds like anymore. By contrast, this album had been recorded using an ultrasimple signal path with ribbon microphones and tube preamplifiers.
I downloaded both the 24/192 PCM and DSD versions. Jim Austin recently wrote that he preferred PCM as he felt DSD suffered from "a slight haze." I felt that the DSD, with its softer high end, was a better match with the Stenheims (though the channels appear to be reversed in DSD). For my critical listening, I had intended to audition just the first track on this album, a cover of Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic," but such was the purity of tone with which singer NOGA's voice and acoustic guitars were reproduced by the Alumine Two. Fives—such was the clarity with which I could hear into the recorded soundscape—that I ended up listening to the entire album, deadline be damned! Props to David Chesky for achieving his "Zen acoustic" goal with this album.
I followed heroes in the seaweed with the Gabrieli Consort's Silence & Music (24/96 FLAC, Signum Classics/Qobuz). As I wrote in the 2022 Records to Die For feature, the standout track on this album is Charles Villiers Stanford's "The Blue Bird," a hauntingly beautiful setting of a poem by Mary Coleridge. The images of the individual singers were presented palpably within the chapel acoustic. The sopranos, who punctuate the verses with the sustained word "blue," floated free of the speakers.
The soundstage on this song was defined precisely, with impressive depth. I cued up one of my own recordings, "13 Trojans of Vundo," from Takes Flight at Yamaha performed by the late Bob Reina's free-jazz group Attention Screen (16/44.1 ALAC, Stereophile STPH021-2; footnote 3). I had recorded this album in 2010 at a concert in Yamaha's YASI recital hall in Manhattan. I primarily used close miking on the instruments. In the mix, I arranged for the image of Mark Flynn's drums to cover the full width of the stage, with the kickdrum a little left of center and the snare drum a little to the right. I placed the image of Bob's piano to extend from stage center to far right. I panned Don Fiorino's lap steel guitar hard left and placed Chris Jones's fretless bass guitar in the center of the stage. These images were correctly and precisely positioned in the space between the Alumine Two.Fives.
I use this track as a test of stereo imaging precision because at both the climax at 5:35 and at the end, I had manipulated the interchannel phasing and reverb on the guitar track to give the impression that the instrument was expanding in size and rising up and away from the listener as its frequency increased. The Stenheims had no problem accurately reproducing the intended effect.
The bass guitar's pedal notes and the kickdrum on "Trojans" were well-defined, so, to investigate the Alumine Two.Five's low-frequency performance further, I played my usual diagnostic tracks: Justin Bieber's "#thatPOWER" from #willpower (16/44.1 MQA, Interscope Records UICS-9136/7); "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)" from Taylor Swift's Red (24/96 FLAC, Big Machine Records/Qobuz); and Jonas Nordwall's performance of the Toccata from Widor's Organ Symphony No.5 (24/88.2 AIFF file).
The Widor recording has a lot of high-level content below 40Hz. This was suppressed with the Alumine Two.Fives—this speaker won't be an optimal choice for pipe-organ aficionados unless they use it with a subwoofer. However, the acoustic of the Portland, Oregon, church where I had recorded this track was accurately portrayed. The clarity with which I could see into the soundscape was impressive.
The dropped bass lines on the Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift tracks didn't have the weight that I experienced with the MoFi SourcePoint 888 floorstanders I reviewed in the March 2025 issue. Even so, the low frequencies sounded very clean. The Stenheim speakers exerted tight control on the upper bass.
This was the case with the Fender bass guitar I had recorded for the channel identification tracks on Editor's Choice. When I mastered this CD, I had boosted the level of the instrument's bottom octave, from 41Hz to 82Hz. The Stenheims accurately portrayed the sound of my bass, again with excellent control—no boom, even with the EQ I had used! Similarly, when I played "Soul Intro/The Chicken," from the late bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius's Truth, Liberty & Soul (24/192 AIFF file, Resonance HCD 2027), his solo fretless bass at the start of this track was effortlessly reproduced by the Alumine Two. Fives, with superb definition.
I mentioned earlier the natural quality of the Stenheim's midrange. Recordings of solo piano are very revealing of problems in a loudspeaker's midrange. The Steinway D on which Robert Silverman had performed Beethoven's Diabelli Variations (16/44.1 ALAC files, Stereophile STPH017-2) sounded uncolored and clean. The image of the piano projected slightly in front of the plane of the speakers. The pounding repeated eight-note motif in the instrument's left-hand register in "Variation 32" had sufficient weight to be viscerally satisfying.
I finished my final critical listening session by playing Dvorák's Symphony No.9, "From The New World," performed by the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gianandrea Noseda (DSD64, National Symphony Orchestra NSO0001). This music was recorded by veteran engineer John Newton.
The cellos and double basses appropriately underpinned the music, the violins and woodwinds sounded sweet, and the Alumine Two.Fives' palpable image of the orchestra spread out between and behind the loudspeakers drew me into the performance. As with NOGA's heroes in the seaweed, I had intended to play just a few diagnostic excerpts from this overly familiar symphony but ended up listening all the way through.
Conclusion
Despite its high sensitivity, the Stenheim Alumine Two.Five's demanding impedance and its presence region balance necessitate careful amplifier matching—see the measurements sidebar. But the superbly clear window this loudspeaker opens into recorded soundstages, its pure-sounding midrange, the fast, well-controlled low frequencies, and its powerfully addictive presentation of recorded detail made the six weeks the speakers spent in my listening room a musically enjoyable experience.
Footnote 3: See youtu.be/K6o8NKY3du8?si=6hUs0Rtw2pLkjGWz.
Straight out of their flight cases, the Alumine Two.Fives sounded bright. The manual recommends 200–300 hours of break-in, but the treble balance became more neutral after only a few days of casual listening. (The review samples had been previously used at a hi-fi show, so I figured that they already had plenty of hours on them.) Nevertheless, while the Stenheim's midrange was impressively uncolored, its low-treble balance was not an optimal match with the Ayre preamplifier, which itself sounds somewhat forward. So I performed all my critical auditioning with the MBL processor connected directly to the power amplifiers.
Once the speakers had settled in, the first thing I noticed was that at the MBL's usual volume control settings they played considerably louder than the MoFi, GoldenEar, and KEF speakers with which I had been living before the Stenheims arrived, an indication of the Stenheims' high sensitivity. The second thing I noticed was that the Alumine Two.Fives loved woman singers. The album heroes in the seaweed has been in constant rotation since its producer, David Chesky, let me know in January about this new release on his label, The Audiophile Society. David had written in an email that he feels like we're living in an age of hyped-up albums with exaggerated top ends and compression, where many people have no idea what real music actually sounds like anymore. By contrast, this album had been recorded using an ultrasimple signal path with ribbon microphones and tube preamplifiers.
I downloaded both the 24/192 PCM and DSD versions. Jim Austin recently wrote that he preferred PCM as he felt DSD suffered from "a slight haze." I felt that the DSD, with its softer high end, was a better match with the Stenheims (though the channels appear to be reversed in DSD). For my critical listening, I had intended to audition just the first track on this album, a cover of Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic," but such was the purity of tone with which singer NOGA's voice and acoustic guitars were reproduced by the Alumine Two. Fives—such was the clarity with which I could hear into the recorded soundscape—that I ended up listening to the entire album, deadline be damned! Props to David Chesky for achieving his "Zen acoustic" goal with this album.
The soundstage on this song was defined precisely, with impressive depth. I cued up one of my own recordings, "13 Trojans of Vundo," from Takes Flight at Yamaha performed by the late Bob Reina's free-jazz group Attention Screen (16/44.1 ALAC, Stereophile STPH021-2; footnote 3). I had recorded this album in 2010 at a concert in Yamaha's YASI recital hall in Manhattan. I primarily used close miking on the instruments. In the mix, I arranged for the image of Mark Flynn's drums to cover the full width of the stage, with the kickdrum a little left of center and the snare drum a little to the right. I placed the image of Bob's piano to extend from stage center to far right. I panned Don Fiorino's lap steel guitar hard left and placed Chris Jones's fretless bass guitar in the center of the stage. These images were correctly and precisely positioned in the space between the Alumine Two.Fives.
I use this track as a test of stereo imaging precision because at both the climax at 5:35 and at the end, I had manipulated the interchannel phasing and reverb on the guitar track to give the impression that the instrument was expanding in size and rising up and away from the listener as its frequency increased. The Stenheims had no problem accurately reproducing the intended effect.
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The bass guitar's pedal notes and the kickdrum on "Trojans" were well-defined, so, to investigate the Alumine Two.Five's low-frequency performance further, I played my usual diagnostic tracks: Justin Bieber's "#thatPOWER" from #willpower (16/44.1 MQA, Interscope Records UICS-9136/7); "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)" from Taylor Swift's Red (24/96 FLAC, Big Machine Records/Qobuz); and Jonas Nordwall's performance of the Toccata from Widor's Organ Symphony No.5 (24/88.2 AIFF file).
The Widor recording has a lot of high-level content below 40Hz. This was suppressed with the Alumine Two.Fives—this speaker won't be an optimal choice for pipe-organ aficionados unless they use it with a subwoofer. However, the acoustic of the Portland, Oregon, church where I had recorded this track was accurately portrayed. The clarity with which I could see into the soundscape was impressive.
The dropped bass lines on the Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift tracks didn't have the weight that I experienced with the MoFi SourcePoint 888 floorstanders I reviewed in the March 2025 issue. Even so, the low frequencies sounded very clean. The Stenheim speakers exerted tight control on the upper bass.
This was the case with the Fender bass guitar I had recorded for the channel identification tracks on Editor's Choice. When I mastered this CD, I had boosted the level of the instrument's bottom octave, from 41Hz to 82Hz. The Stenheims accurately portrayed the sound of my bass, again with excellent control—no boom, even with the EQ I had used! Similarly, when I played "Soul Intro/The Chicken," from the late bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius's Truth, Liberty & Soul (24/192 AIFF file, Resonance HCD 2027), his solo fretless bass at the start of this track was effortlessly reproduced by the Alumine Two. Fives, with superb definition.
I mentioned earlier the natural quality of the Stenheim's midrange. Recordings of solo piano are very revealing of problems in a loudspeaker's midrange. The Steinway D on which Robert Silverman had performed Beethoven's Diabelli Variations (16/44.1 ALAC files, Stereophile STPH017-2) sounded uncolored and clean. The image of the piano projected slightly in front of the plane of the speakers. The pounding repeated eight-note motif in the instrument's left-hand register in "Variation 32" had sufficient weight to be viscerally satisfying.
I finished my final critical listening session by playing Dvorák's Symphony No.9, "From The New World," performed by the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gianandrea Noseda (DSD64, National Symphony Orchestra NSO0001). This music was recorded by veteran engineer John Newton.
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ConclusionDespite its high sensitivity, the Stenheim Alumine Two.Five's demanding impedance and its presence region balance necessitate careful amplifier matching—see the measurements sidebar. But the superbly clear window this loudspeaker opens into recorded soundstages, its pure-sounding midrange, the fast, well-controlled low frequencies, and its powerfully addictive presentation of recorded detail made the six weeks the speakers spent in my listening room a musically enjoyable experience.
Footnote 3: See youtu.be/K6o8NKY3du8?si=6hUs0Rtw2pLkjGWz.
