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November 19, 2011: "Sven is on his way to you. We have just decided to go to High-End Munich together! Here is a photo of the loudspeakers he will bring to you. Have a great time."

B8 at Pia & Gino Colombo's
That was Pia Colombo from Colotube. At HighEnd Suisse 2011 I'd suggested to both Gino Colombo and Sven Boenicke that they meet. Here were two exceptional Swiss designers with fabulous products. Might they not perhaps collaborate in the future? First of course they had to cross paths. Sven subsequently confirmed that they had; and that as a result he might just design a special high-efficiency model which would be custom-tailored to Gino's 10-watt 300B SET monos. He'd also hinted at a possible Munich 2012 collaboration. Stopping over at the Colombos in Lyss on his way from Zürich to our digs at Lac Leman, the deal had just gotten inked. I'd simply been informed before he arrived. Synchronicity!
Audiomanufacture Boenicke at the Mövenpick Hotel
Sven was bringing his personal pair of B8s to accommodate a few comparative comments to the B10. But first a few choice words on pricing and the best-laid plans of mice and men. The cost of neodymium as a primarily China-sourced rare earth magnet quadrupled this year. This seriously drove up the raw cost of speaker drive units using such motors. Sven next encountered challenges to get his bent planks done in Switzerland to accurate specs. This was despite using a top-billed snow sled supplier who specializes in curving solid woods. What Boenicke had envisioned to become a more affordable alternative to his carved-from-solid-wood models transformed into the costlier alternative. While keeping margins slimmer to soften the blow, the B8 price thus had to increase to CHF8.890/pr. The B10 with its slew of exotic tweaks settled in at CHF16.460. Sven's personal issue isn't price-to-performance ratio. He believes he's still highly competitive. It's basic perception. The deliberately petite dimensions of the B8 and B10 don't readily telegraph what your cashish went up in smoke for.

"The CHF 5.000 price point I'd targeted for the B8 was to create an entry into our range. This position will actually be filled by a miniature SLS called W8. It'll use a single 3-inch tweeter on the front and the same sidefiring 7-inch woofers of the B8. Though it seems perverse, the fully automated routing procedure involved in trimming down solid laminated wood blocks to the required hollow line innards for two clam shells is cheaper than the considerable hand labor involved in these bent plank constructions."

B8 vs. B10. With four times the woofer conage over the smaller model—approximating a ca. 14" infra woofer—the B10's sealed bass is obviously true sub turf. That's an expected and thus utterly predictable difference. The truth is, at civilized levels with most music and in smaller to medium rooms it won't factor much. There the twin 7ers of the B8 will more than suffice. The dead-obvious and very relevant if unexpected differences arose with tonal sophistication—think transitioning from a triode-strapped EL34 to an NOS globe 45—and seriously mo betta, no absolutely superlative ambient recovery. How the B10 blew open the doors of the soundstage rear and elucidated the audible space of the recorded venue was a different world altogether.


Let's inspect the apparent causes. First to the basic design. The B10 is a 4-driver two-way with a 15uF/8Ω cap plus 6Ω Duelund graphite/silver resistor in front of the paralleled 4-inch mid/tweeters. The cap's 6dB/octave high-pass hinges at 1.5kHz to produce audible output to 400Hz. The series-connected woofers whose compact neodymium magnets are held captive in the opposing walls run wide open. Their rear emissions load into thousands of special cardboard-trapped minuscule air channels. This scheme effectively exhausts the air action inside the crammed enclosure.
Octave MRE-130, Trafomatic Kaivalya, JE Audio VM60, ModWright KWA-100SE
That's when the real voodoo kicks in. The +/- legs of the mid/tweeters sport dedicated (i.e. different) versions of Jack Bybee's most recent Golden Goddess purifiers. Each tweeter magnet gets three Harmonix tuning dots whilst the outside frames add four Marigo dots each. There are Stein Music e-pads on the inside of the terminal plate and the thin wood rail separating the two tweeter cutouts. Then there are fat Stein Music speaker matching devices aka Zobel filters in parallel to the inputs. Finally there are unobtainium 'David's Black Wonder' phase linearization devices. Of the latter Sven reports that they retract forward splosives to become spatially coincident with the singer again so that sibilants for example no longer occur closer to the listener than the rest of the voice.


The final albeit not built in and thus optional youdo are Sven's ingenious Swingbases. Those are hollow stanchions with a steel wire suspended from the threaded top. The nicely contoured outrigger plates hold the narrow wooden speakers securely upright. They sport receiver hollows beneath their four threaded holes for the regular footers. Leaving out the footers leaves four holes with lateral slits. Slide a hanging wire into each slit. Now the terminated ends catch in the hollows underneath. Voilà. With a bit of stanchion turning to ensure that nothing catches (and perhaps adjusting height to counter crooked floors), suddenly the entire speaker floats freely. A light touch will set it swingin' as though on roller blocks.

With the self-cancelling force of the opposing woofers, the only motional action this speaker can theoretically undergo—i.e. an actual applied force that might move it back and forth in space were it free to do so—derives from the excursion of those twinned 4ers pushing against the enclosure. Ha. The truth is, no matter how loud you play, you'll never get the B10 to swing from its hoists. Even so there's a perplexing audible clean-up effect (which Sven explains gets a lot more pronounced with his W10 model and its five front-firing drivers.)


If ever there was cause to throw up your arms in anguish over inexplicable tweaks, it's the B10's profound spatial advantage over the B8. The amount of depth it rolls out; the space it inserts between various soundstage layers; the exactitude whereby one can hone down on anything one cares to inspect... all that operates at true state-of-the-art magnitude. The phenomenal off-axis response of these flat mid/tweeters adds its own 'quasi-extended' crossfeed effect. If you're inclined to cinerama scope, it invites excessive speaker spacing without any central collapse. Anti-phase effects outside the speakers are very pronounced too. Very obviously the time domain behavior of the B10 has been pushed hard. The ultra narrow baffles probably don't hurt either.


Masterful studio productions by tricky wizards like Turkish DJ Mercan Dede thus go into spatial hyper drive. Think three-dimensional ping pong between six cross-playing Chinese masters to conjure up something extreme. This feature turns the B10 into a drug for severe soundstage addicts. With serious infrasonic coverage it's about the full experience too. It's not about mini monitor histrionics without real gravitas. It's about true LF pressure waves. And it's about sealed bass, not messy ported ringing that screws up the group delay.

Clearly this level of tweakiness doesn't come cheap. But the comprehensive—fanatical even—attention which Boenicke has lavished on effective tweaks whose invisibility doesn't appease trophy hunters... it's an object lesson in how to be utterly unreasonable about not compromising. To feel good you'll want a complex multi-way with ceramic drivers and composite walls. You'll want big and heavy. With Boenicke you get exceptionally attractive and tidy but small and light. A pretty toy perhaps. Definitely at first glance. This speaker thus cares nothing about fitting in. It'll fit only into extremist performance visions which simultaneously insist on fine furniture finish and compact dimensions rather than monkey coffins. And there has to be a nearly insider's sympathy for a sticker that'd buy you half a very fine new car aka a pretty brilliant used ride.

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