The Stenheim Sessions – April 19th 2023
It’s very important for us that the audio components we offer have a sonic quality we love. It’s even better when the company behind the components has an ethos and philosophy aligned with ours. So, imagine our delight when we auditioned the Swiss-made Stenheim range of speakers at the Munich High-End show in 2019. For such a relative new company (founded in 2010), the Stenheim sound was captivating, with a natural tonality from the first listen. The company also has a very strong passion for music and live recordings, as revealed on their Acoustics Sessions page. We love this passion.
We recently received our first delivery of Stenheim in Australia; the Alumine 2SE and Alumine 3 speakers, followed closely by the Alumine 5SE. The Alumine 5SE are the 2022 winner of the Absolute Sound Golden Ear ‘Product Of The Year’. In Audio circles, this is the pre-eminent award to win. On Wednesday 19th April, we held a Nirvana music event to celebrate the Stenheim Alumine loudspeaker range with a mixture of vinyl and streamed music, using both our reference Ypsilon system, plus the Aesthetic Mimas integrated amplifier – which also happens to be a Golden Ear award-winning component!
It was nearly standing room only for ‘The Stenheim Sessions’ music event – and it was wonderful to see so many new faces in the crowd!
We started the evening with a brief overview of the speakers, their background and design, then the overall systems. The Alumine 2SEs were powered by the articulate DarTZeel integrated amplifier/streamer; The larger, top-of-range and award-winning Alumine 5SEs were driven by the Ypsilon pre-power combo. Both systems were streamed to using a Taiko server and Ypsilon DAC and we started with streaming on both systems; we then switched to vinyl for the second half, only on the Alumine 5SEs.
We started listening to the Alumine 2SE+DarTZeel combo as an introduction, with four different tracks, all of which were highly regarded recordings. The Audience was suitably impressed for stand mount speakers. The majority of the evening revolved around the Alumine 5SE+Ypsilon system, both with streaming then vinyl. The audience majority felt an already great sound went next level when the needle dropped!
After the evening’s ‘official’ conclusion, most people stayed well into the evening, enjoying the wonderful sound of the Stenheims. Thank you to all who participated.
