Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

If I have a bias toward Magico, it's because I've never heard a Magico speaker I didn't like. Even so, when I listened to the company's M6 towers ($185,000/pair) in a large demo room at AXPONA 2022, my brain broke.

One of the things I value most in life is clarity. In my work, in my intellectual pursuits, and in my relationships, I try to cut through the noise and find the place where I can clearly see facts, goals, feelings, the big picture. If I can find clarity, it's much easier to form opinions, make plans, and take action. Success becomes more likely.

In audio reproduction, my values are similar. I can't enjoy music if the system is producing a clouded, muddy, overly warm, or otherwise unclear sound. I want the electromechanical representation of music to be richly detailed, sharply focused, and full range in dynamics and frequency. In that kind of all-encompassing and attention-demanding aesthetic, I can truly hear what the music is about. Under those conditions, the nature of the recording—good or bad, craft or crud—is plainly heard.

Stereophile has favorably reviewed three loudspeakers from Swiss manufacturer Stenheim. Art Dudley reviewed the Alumine standmount in April 2012 and the Alumine Five floorstander in March 2018. More recently, Herb Reichert reviewed Stenheim's three-and-a-half-way Alumine Three tower in October 2021. My assignment for this month's issue was to review the company's Alumine Two. Five floorstander, which, at $23,500/pair, fits neatly between the Alumine Two ($13,500/pair) and Three ($36,500/pair).

It's not unusual for audiophiles to have fond childhood recollections of the old family stereo, but Eelco Grimm's memory of his dad's audio system probably stands alone. It's not just that Piet Grimm, a professional pilot for the Dutch air defense, had a pair of very fine Infinity speakers, a Pioneer receiver, and a Technics turntable. Others surely did, too. It's more that he purchased the system from a military PX shop at a US air force base in Germany, then happily flew the equipment home to the Netherlands on his Northrop F5 supersonic fighter plane. That's not run-of-the-mill cool, that's Top Gun cool.

Years later, Eelco, too, started taking stereo gear to new altitudes, becoming a designer of high-end speakers and electronics. After Grimm Audio, a 15-person enterprise, moved to a building near Eindhoven airport in the southern Netherlands, he realized that it stands in almost the exact spot where his dad used to park his fighter jet.

What if there was a character in Stanley Kubrick's classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey who was an audiophile? Aboard the Discovery One interplanetary space ship, what would his system look like? He'd probably have a pair of ultramodern speakers that could pluck sound out of the ether. He'd control the system with something like a present-day smartphone or tablet, commanding the HAL 9000 computer to play his favorite songs. The speakers would stand unobtrusively in a white room with 1970s modern-minimalist furniture, no rack of components to drive them, no wires connecting them, no shelves of physical media to play. And they would fill the room with music.

I am sitting earthbound in my living room almost a quarter-century beyond the year 2001, living a similar scenario with the Focal Diva Utopia streaming amplified wireless speaker system. My living room is not at all reminiscent of the Discovery One with its rotating central interior (footnote 1). But with the Diva Utopia system, I feel more in a sci-fi future young me might have imagined than with any hi-fi component I've reviewed so far. About the only thing the Diva Utopia has in common with the stereo systems I grew up with—and with my current reference system—is two floorstanding cabinets and diaphragms that move air to make sound.

Since the original WATT/Puppy concept kicked off in the late 1980s, there has been a 40-year evolution leading to the latest version reviewed here. The loudspeaker's price in 2025 is around $40,000/pair compared to the original's $8000. While inflation alone would have lifted the price to $25,000/pair, the current price takes into account the many technological and design improvements. While remaining physically separable, the upper "WATT" (Wilson Audio Tiny Tot) component, namely the head unit of the latest design, can no longer be run as a small full-range loudspeaker in its own right. This is because the mid/treble crossover, which was originally in the WATT, is now relocated to the lower "Puppy" section. Certainly, that original two-box "full range," strongly sculpted WATT/Puppy stack radically broke the mold in deviating from those rather plain, coffin-shaped tower loudspeakers that were popular in this category.

The late David Wilson originally created the WATT as a shelf-mount studio monitor to help produce his recordings. At the time, this compact two-way promised near–state-of-the-art sound quality, especially transparency, indicative of very low self-noise. This quality also helped to maximize dynamic range and contrast. Later, David used the WATT as the foundation for a three-way floorstanding design by matching it to a low-frequency system (the Puppy), which also stood in as a physical platform for the WATT. This idea became reality in the successful W/P line of bass augmented systems.

Taste is a funny thing. Love cilantro? Millions swear it tastes like soap. Similarly, design cognoscenti will gush over a minimalist Scandinavian sofa that others dismiss as just a pricey plank with delusions of grandeur.

There's no accounting for taste, or so the truism goes. But arguing over preferences is exactly what many audiophiles do. Similarly, Stereophile reviewers are all about parsing and evaluating sound, and how a product looks isn't usually a big part of the equation. But I'll buck that convention and say that the radically shaped Estelon X Diamond Mk IIs aren't just the most visually sublime speakers I've laid eyes on; they ought to be part of the Cooper Hewitt Museum's permanent collection. Or MOMA's.