2023 Golden Ear: Stenheim Alumine Five SE Dynamic Loudspeaker

REVIEW
by Jonathan Valin
Apr 30, 2024

$72,000

In 2021, I had the pleasure of reviewing one of the finest 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 in 2022, 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 said in my review, what it actually is is a chunky little stick of dynamite. With a near-hornlike sensitivity of 94dB/1W/1m and a stable 8-ohm impedance, the Alumine Five SE is capable of simply phenomenal dynamics—unexceeded in speed, power, and nuance by those of 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 about 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. 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, once again, wins one of my Golden Ear awards for 2023, but it also won TAS’ Overall Product of the Year Award in 2022. (328)

Tags: GOLDEN EAR AWARD STENHEIM LOUDSPEAKER FLOORSTANDING

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.