“At Stenheim, we are proud of the Reference Ultime line but recognize their demanding nature – in terms of system requirements, space and price. We wanted to make Reference Ultime level performance more accessible and bring it to a wider audience. To do this, we had to preserve the incredible musical integrity of the Reference Ultime speakers, but deliver it in a smaller and more affordable format. That was the challenge.”
Conceived and built entirely in Switzerland, Stenheim’s new Reference Ultime Two speakers offer the proven design approach, components and materials used successfully in the brand’s Reference Ultime models, in a product that’s easier to accommodate.
To better understand the concept, it helps to revisit the Stenheim story. The company was founded in 2010, by a team that had previously worked together for Nagra, a brand that is globally recognized for its professional recorders, but is also the pinnacle of extreme high-end audio from Switzerland, for a few lucky people with enough money.
Stenheim’s founders branched out to form their own company with the goal of becoming the leading Swiss high-end loudspeaker brand. The company’s first product, the Alumine 2, was the result of two years of intensive research and development. These compact, two-way speakers with an all-aluminum cabinet, high-efficiency and easy load characteristics defined the technological blueprint for the company. In 2012 the model evolved still further, to include an integrated sub-woofer, creating the full-range Alumine Third Way.
Building on the AlumineTwo’s early success, the Reference Ultime was intended to be the company’s ultimate expression, using a three-way topology, seven drivers and a massive enclosure. Short after the launch, the company created “Stenheim Acoustic Sessions,” a record label designed to give artists the chance to record original tracks in unusual places and under exceptional acoustic conditions. The unique quality of the resulting recordings was quickly recognized and those Acoustic Sessions soon became central to the identity of the Stenheim brand.
The next speaker was the floor-standing, three-way Alumine Five, a speaker that combined more manageable dimensions with considerable bandwidth, easy drive with high sensitivity. And the Alumine Five was soon joined by the compact, floor-standing Alumine Three, a speaker that has quickly become one of the brand’s most important and popular products. That continuing success with both new and established models has allowed the company to grow to the point where they could no longer exist in the original premises. In 2020 Stenheim invested in a brand new factory at Vetroz, in the heart of the Valais. As well as allowing more efficient production and storage of our products, the new factory also includes a listening facility and showroom for visitors.
Reference Ultime Two
Technical specifications for the new Reference Ultime Two loudspeakers start with a full d’Appolito array with two 12” woofers, two 6.5” midrange drivers and one 25mm soft-dome tweeter. As always, fitted within a massive CNC machined aluminum enclosure with six independent, internal sealed chambers for each midrange and tweeter driver, and bass chambers loaded with rear-facing laminar flow ports. Even the passive three-way crossover, is sealed in an airtight chamber. The company details a frequency response from 25Hz to 35kHz with a sensitivity of 95dB, and 400 WRMS (800W peak) power rating with 4 ohm nominal impedance for this design. Each speaker weights 231Kg.
Otherwise, the speaker design remains minimalistic, with marked edges as all previous precision-machined Stenheim products, even though the company claims to “understand the relationship between the physical and the subjective, reproduction and appreciation.” And while big speaker enclosures made of aluminum directly invoke the cleanest of digital audio sources, Stenheim normally promotes demonstrations of his speakers with exclusive vinyl prints, esoteric turntables and cables - all decidedly very analog.
According to Stenheim, the Reference Ultime Two are about rediscovering the sense of live music and performance. And all while using a smaller cabinet than the existing Reference Ultime models, “Carefully controlling the low-frequency output so as not to suffer from excessive boundary reinforcement or to overload the available volume.”
“At the same time, it would have to honor our core electrical values: high efficiency and easy, non-reactive load characteristics — the performance parameters that define Stenheim designs — allowing our speakers to reproduce convincing musical dynamics and making them so engaging to listen to,” the company adds.
As detailed, the Reference Ultime Two cabinet is just a little shorter and a little less deep than the existing Reference Ultime models. The new design also eliminates the active option, but includes bi-wire terminals, to allow for bi-amplified operation. The choice of drivers remains the same, with the largest difference being that the new Reference Ultime Two employs a pair of rear-facing laminar flow reflex ports (similar to those developed and used in the Alumine Five models), to load the two large front-mounted 12” drivers.
The company offers 5 years’ warranty on the Reference Ultime Two and is now taking orders.
www.stenheim.com
