Stenheim Alumine Five 3-way Floorstanding Speaker
Following the critical and commercial success of the Alumine Two was no easy task. Building a bigger, more ambitious speaker that still maintained the Two’s sense of musical articulation, coherence and communication? That’s a serious challenge. But it’s a challenge that the Alumine Five took up and mastered in spectacular fashion.
Even a brief glance will reveal the shared DNA: the classical proportions of the elegant, thin-wall cabinet; the drivers that are just a little larger than you expect; the clean styling and absence of visible fixings. There’s no doubt that this is a Stenheim speaker – even before you listen to it.
That DNA goes much deeper than the way the Alumine Five looks. It informs every aspect of its design and every aspect of its remarkable performance. Far bigger than the Alumine Two, the thinking and technology in the Five is almost identical. The latest, treated pulp cone bass and mid drivers are paired with a sophisticated fabric dome tweeter. The crossover relies on the same carefully engineered topology, ensuring smooth driver transitions, a non-reactive load and the absence of damaging out-of-band artefacts. The beautifully engineered cabinet is precision machined from aluminium plates, with internal baffles and braces to further increase rigidity and stainless-steel hardware to ensure consistency. The twin slot ports and braces are carefully radiused to reduce turbulence in the enclosed air volume. The cabinet walls are treated with the same, multi-layered, low-volume damping materials to kill mechanical resonance.
Even more importantly – and despite the added complexity of its three-way topology – the crossover has been exhaustively engineered and relentlessly fine-tuned to maintain the phase-coherence and non-reactive, low-loss load characteristics that are the foundation of the Alumine Two’s lucid clarity and naturally organized musical presentation.
The result is a speaker that offers the same easy load, the same low stored energy and the same low coloration levels. But it combines them with even higher efficiency and wider bandwidth – to potent musical effect. Despite being the same size as (or smaller than) its immediate competition, the advantages of thin-wall cabinet construction mean that in acoustic terms, the Alumine Five is actually much larger, while the twin 10” bass drivers provide a greater swept area. Together those things add up to a massive musical advantage. A speaker that goes deeper, louder, quicker, provides more detail and more dynamic range – and is actually easier to drive!
You hear it in the musical scale and power that the Alumine Fives can deliver. You also hear it in their agile, responsive and articulate performance. Their flat impedance characteristic and high sensitivity make them easy to control, giving your amplifier a far easier job. That allows the system to preserve the micro-dynamic nuance and subtleties in the playing, the relationship between instruments, the emotional range in a singer’s voice. The Alumine Fives embrace the performance and carry it, alive and (when necessary) kicking, right into your listening room.
Along with all that musical and acoustical power and energy you also get responsivity. The Alumine Five’s bass drivers are independently loaded and slot-ported, offering not just superior bandwidth and dynamics but remarkable control and in-room behaviour. The stainless steel spikes and footers ensure not just stable placement and effective mechanical grounding, but precise control over the speakers’ height and attitude, critical factors in maximising their performance potential.
At Stenheim, we don’t just want to know what our speakers are capable of. We want each and every customer to experience their full performance for themselves.
These are speakers that are designed right from the start to work with your system, to work with your room, with one goal in mind: delivering more music from your recordings – all of your recordings, all of the time. Big enough to handle the most demanding music, with a natural sense of scale and musical purpose, the Alumine Five can go just as small and intimate as the musicians, the performance and the recording demands. It’s not just as much speaker as many listeners will ever need – it’s more music than many of them thought possible.
Alumine Five SE
Like other speakers in the Alumine line, the Stenheim Alumine Five is also available as a Special Edition, the Alumine Five SE. Nominated as The Absolute Sound’s overall Product of the Year 2022, the Five SE takes the phenomenal performance of the Alumine Five and manages to raise it to even greater heights.
It takes the same sophisticated cabinet design and drivers but laces them together with a cost-no-object crossover, built with the finest available components. The Alumine Five’s crossover is exactingly and meticulously engineered to be as musically unobtrusive as possible. But through the selection of even higher grade components, it is possible to release a whole new level of musical information: greater resolution, richer textures, more articulate rhythms and more natural dynamics.
Exhaustive listening tests have led us to develop our own internal wiring and select the very best parts from Mundorf and Jantzen, Audyn, Myflex and Jupiter – a Who’s Who of boutique audiophile brands. The result is even greater transparency and dimensionality, even more natural separation and perspectives, micro-dynamic and harmonic resolution, a greater range of tonal colour. The result is more music, more musician and less speaker. In fact, more of what makes the Alumine Five such a great speaker in the first place. In the words of Jonathan Valin of The Absolute Sound : “the Stenheim Five SE is not just a great speaker: it is one of high-end audio's greatest speakers.” Truly “one for the ages”.
Alumine Five Signature Limited Edition
Stenheim collaborates closely with the award-winning and internationally renowned recording engineer Jean-Claude Gaberel. He has recorded the bespoke Stenheim Acoustic Sessions for us which gives artists the chance to record original tracks in unusual places and in exceptional acoustic conditions. His ears are also employed to help us finetune our designs during the development stage. Based on some of his input, we have created an ultimate version of the Alumine Five: The Alumine Five Signature Limited Edition.
With an even greater emphasis on ultimate resolution and transparency, we were able to target specific aspects of the Alumine Five’s design. By putting the electronics of the crossover in a separate, external casing, we were able to eliminate any compromise at all in the design that might have resulted from limited space inside the speaker cabinet. Free from space constraints, the components used in the crossover could be completely reassessed. Taking the crossover out of the speaker also has the added advantage of isolating it from any vibrations, maintaining mechanical stability and thus safeguarding the finest instrumental detail.
The cabinet has been mass loaded by filling the void left by the original crossover with heavy damping materials that further reduce cabinet colouration, increase mechanical stability and as a result, establish an even more precise reference plane for the drivers. Parasitic resonance in the baffle is damped using a leather ‘skin’, reducing intermodulation distortion between the drivers. This leather covering on the baffle also adds an aesthetic touch with its handstitched Stenheim logo further communicating the bespoke nature of the Signature model.
The Alumine Five Signature offers listeners unparalleled insight into their recordings: how the piece was played and how it was captured by the microphones and engineers. The level of detail and clarity in the music becomes quite astonishing. The Signature model is the apotheosis of the Alumine Five design, destined for the most demanding music lovers.
Absolute Sound (Best Sound at Show – AXPONA 2019), Jonathan Valin, 2019
The four-driver, three-way Stenheim Alumine Five driven by VTL and sourced by VPI/Lyra, was very good on The Band Last Waltz LPs I brought to Chicago, with superb staging, imaging, tone, dynamics and bass. It was quite good on my Pretenders LP, too, with unusually good expressiveness on Chrissie Hynde’s vocals. It showed none of the flashes of brightness or of megaphoning that I heard so often with other displays. Simply an excellent balance of all criteria, and excellent sound.
Art Dudley, Stereophile, 2018
The Alumine Five sets itself apart by offering traditional high-end audio strengths, very wide bandwidth, excellent spatial performance, and freedom from gross colorations, with the drivability and consequent good levels of touch, force, and musical momentum that are seldom associated with loudspeakers of contemporary design and manufacture.
Jonathan Valin in The Absolute Sound magazine.
“The Stenheim Five SE is not just a great speaker; it is one of high-end audio’s greatest speakers. Its ability to generate truly deep, linear, powerful bass, unusually rich and lifelike tone color, near-visible three-dimensional images, and astounding detail and dynamics from such a modest enclosure is not just a surprise; it is one for the ages.”
Bruno Castelluzzo, Haute-Fidélité Magazine, 2022
“The Alumine FIVE SE set the bar for high-fidelity incredibly high, whether than be in terms of definition, inexhaustible dynamics, the extraordinary variety of nuances or the realism of the sound stage, but in a perfect fusion of these elements that has almost never been heard before in this format. Taking a completely classic approach, their qualities do justice to the emotion and the natural energy of the music, creating special moments with an extraordinary talent. These indispensable loudspeakers free the musical energy of the very best recordings with panache: they are true prodigies!”
Product Specifications
Type
3-way floor-standing speaker with four high-efficiency transducers.
Construction
Massive aluminum cabinet with four independent chambers. The midrange and tweeter chambers are sealed, while the woofer chambers feature laminated front ports.
Frequency Response
28 Hz – 35 kHz.
Power Handling
200 W RMS, 400 W peak.
Sensitivity
94 dB SPL (2.83 V/1 m), measured in a semi-reverberant room.
Maximum SPL
109 dB.
Nominal Impedance
8 Ω.
Drivers
Two 10-inch woofers, one 6.5-inch neodymium midrange driver, and one neodymium tweeter.
Crossover
Passive 3-way crossover using audiophile-grade components.
Bi-Wiring
Yes, with WBT Nextgen binding posts.
Finishes
Light Shiny Grey, Dark Shiny Grey, Full Black, wood veneer, leather veneer, or special finishes on request.
Special Versions
Special Edition (SE) with premium crossover components, upgraded internal wiring, and high-quality connectors. The Signature by JC Gaberel version adds an external crossover, front leather baffle, massive aluminum platform, dedicated internal wiring, and custom tuning for each speaker.
Warranty
5 years.
Dimensions
1,200 × 280 × 330 mm (H × W × D) / 47.2 × 11 × 13 in.
Weight
100 kg each; 130 kg each for the Signature version.
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