The made-in-Switzerland Stenheim Alumine Three floorstanding loudspeaker sells for $32,900/pair. It is not only the most expensive component I’ve reviewed for Stereophile; it costs more than 10 times (!) as much as my $3000/pair reference Falcon Acoustics Gold Badge LS3/5a speaker. So naturally I wondered: Will it sound 10 times better? And if it does sound 10 times better, what might the nature of the improvements be?

The Alumine Three (footnote 1) is a slender, floorstanding speaker measuring 41.3″ high, 9.8″ wide, and just 13″ deep. Because it contains four sturdy drivers bolted to a thick, bottom-ported aluminum cabinet, it weighs 154lb each. Importer-dealer Walter Swanbon dragged them in on a hand truck with fancy pneumatic tires and set them on my floor in the exact spots I pointed to.

He said, “Herb, I promise you’ll like these speakers. They’re a serious, top-end design. With paper cones. Voices sound human. Instruments sound natural. They are designed to compete with speakers like Magico and Wilson, but they are easier to drive. You can use all your low-powered amps.” He added, “And they fit in nicely in regular people’s living rooms. They’re not as fat as the wide Harbeths or as tall as the tall Wilsons.” As Walter pitched the Stenheims, I kept nodding and repeating, “Wow, that’s cool.”

I was skeptical. I seriously doubted they’d play well with 25 watts. I was however surprised and impressed by how tastefully tailored Euro-svelte the Alumine Threes looked in my room. Not glitzy or shiny. During my previous auditions (in audio show rooms and dealer showrooms), Stenheim speakers always did their obligatory Swiss-precision thing, but their natural, nonmetallic tone kept the music and the humans making it at center stage.

As soon as Walter left, I connected the Alumine Threes to my 25Wpc Pass Labs XA25 stereo amplifier and played Cheikh Lô’s Balbalou (24/96 FLAC, Chapter Two Records/Qobuz)—and dang me if I didn’t think, yep, sure enough, these speakers do sound expensive. (Expensive is a sound descriptor I’ve never used before. Here, it means “exquisitely formed.”)

And Walter did not lie about how easy they are to drive. At my normal, average 75–85dB listening levels (C-weighted at 2m), the Stenheims performed effortlessly with 25 watts.

The first thing I noticed about the Alumine Three’s basic sound character was how unusually smooth (frequency-wise) and well-articulated (transient and detail-wise) they were. Throughout my auditions, the Alumine Three’s most obvious and appealing trait was its well-structured, evenly focused clarity.

After a few random tracks, the Imp of the Perverse (aka Herb’s shoulder demon, my constant companion) began jabbering in my ear, insisting I try the 10W into 8 ohms RAAL-requisite HSA-1b speaker and headphone amp I’m writing about in this month’s Gramophone Dreams. The 3″ tall demon shouted, “Pass Labs lied! The XA25 puts out more than 25 watts.” (Which is true. John Atkinson’s measurements showed that the XA25 can deliver 80W into 8 ohms and 130W into 4 ohms.) The Imp was sure the $32,900 Stenheims would suffocate trying to breathe with only 10 watts.

When, as usual, I did what the Imp told me to do, the Alumine Three seemed quite comfortable with 10 watts. Betting the RAAL amp would clip, the Imp kept bugging me to turn the volume up, but even at higher-than-normal listening levels, the Alumine Threes breathed easily, playing Evelyn Glennie’s watt-sucking Concertos for Mallet Instruments (24/96 FLAC Naxos/Qobuz) at 85dB with short, seemingly undistorted 99dB peaks. The Imp grumbled indistinctly.

Tall, handsome, and sensitive
The pdf brochure on the Stenheim website specifies the Alumine Three’s sensitivity as “93dB, half-space.” I recognized that “half-space” expression from buying raw speaker drivers, but I wondered why Stenheim was stating it that way in its specifications. When I asked Walter Swanbon to clarify, he connected me with Jean-Pascal Panchard, Stenheim’s owner, CEO, and chief designer. “For this measurement, our loudspeakers are placed directly on the floor, one boundary, and therefore a half-space,” Panchard told me in an email. “The ceiling [and] rear and side walls can have different impacts on the frequency-dependent sensitivity based on the loudspeaker location and the wall materials (absorbent and/or reverberant). The half-space value is then the minimum sensitivity a user can get in a well-damped monitoring room.” Stenheim specifies the nominal impedance as 8 ohms with a minimum of 3 ohms.

The Alumine Three’s driver lineup consists of two 8″ woofers and a 5″ midrange, all made of a “proprietary multi-layer cone material” that Jean-Pascal describes as a “high-strength cellulose fiber impregnated and coated on both sides with damped resins.” Midrange and bass drivers are made by PHL Audio. Above the midrange cone is a 1″ silk-dome tweeter with a neodymium magnet, from Scan-Speak.

The bottom woofer employs a “high-excursion half-roll HBR rubber surround.” The upper 8″ woofer has a pleated textile surround. According to Jean-Pascal, “the transducer with the rubber surround is used to achieve bass-extension, and the woofer with the fabric surround is for better transient reproduction.”

According to Panchard, the two bass transducers are tuned to share the same low-frequency enclosure volume, but the two drivers have different low-pass turnover points. Both drivers’ back waves exit through a narrow slot-type port situated along the front of the cabinet’s bottom.

The Alumine Three’s crossover uses Mundorf components and is divided into two parts: the bass section (mounted in the bass compartment) with turnover points at 145Hz and 300Hz, and the mid-tweeter part (mounted in an upper compartment) with a 2.4kHz crossover frequency.

The Alumine Three’s chambered, internally braced cabinet is built from CNC-machined aluminum panels of thickness that varies between 0.5″ and 1″.

Setup
Before Swanbon delivered the Stenheims, he told me on the phone, “I know your room and how speakers sound in it. The Stenheims will drop right in.” Which they did, within inches of where I pointed. After Walter left, I moved them a few inches closer together and experimented by varying the distance from the front wall. As I moved them about, their tone character and focus changed barely at all. Their “listening window” seemed broad in the horizontal plane. What seemed to matter most was toe-in. I ended up with the Threes 6′ apart, with 33″ between their front faces and the wall behind them. Image focus and high-frequency tone seemed best with the Stenheims toed in so that they crossed just behind my head.

Normally, I slouch on the couch with my ears between 34″ and 36″ from the floor, but the Alumine Three’s tweeters sit 38″ above the floor. Listening to dual-mono pink noise (from Stereophile‘s Editor’s Choice CD) confirmed my casual listening impressions—that they’re at their best a little higher than my usual slouch—which encouraged me to either keep my head up or move my seat farther back. I tried both.

Footnote 1: Art Dudley reviewed the earlier Stenheim Alumine standmount loudspeaker in April 2012 and the floorstanding Alumine Five in March 2018.—Ed.

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COMPANY INFO

Stenheim Suisse SA

US brand ambassador: Fidelis Distribution

460 Amherst St. (Route 101A)

Nashua, NH 03063

(603) 880-4434

stenheim.com

ARTICLE CONTENTS

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Specifications
Associated Equipment
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