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Overall tonal balance was quite even. In my favored setup the bass between 80 and 120Hz was slightly goosed albeit without introducing typical warmth. The midband in fact seemed slightly shy particularly on male vocals. On my son's audio book Christoph Maria Herbst reads King Julius. Fundamentally his voice was very convincing and natural but just a bit less chesty than I'm used to. This also happened with Gil Scott-Heron's baritone from his I'm new here album which rendered him physically smaller. Female voices meanwhile felt very much on the money. Overall the vocal range leaned slightly into the sober/informative feel than the seductive and enhanced. The recording itself had to supply sugary gloss if there was to be any.


I spotted a minor dip in the mid-woofer/treble transition. Because this range is vital for the formation of certain consonants (particularly 'p' and 't' sounds), those were rendered less specific than over speakers without this minor softness. My son thus listened to his book a tick louder than usual to make out the subtleties in the spoken delivery. This minor depression in the transitional range is a common trick to avoid out-of-band driver distortion without relying on hyper-steep crossover slopes. Speakers without this contour are often experienced as being too present on sibilants. Routinely this isn't due to any primary response deviation but a lack of filter suppression of the mid-woofer's first out-of-band breakup mode.

Overall speech intelligibility and midrange resolution were more than respectable. The blend of drivers was very well done since I couldn't make out any differences in character. As always subjective treble response was relative to physical positioning. To get the Nuberts' best, some experimentation is in order. Stand height should have the tweeter slightly above your ears. Distance to the front wall is quite variable. The manufacturer recommends a minimum of 3cm. Cough. Given the port's big diameter this surprised me to promptly demand verification. I'd strongly recommend against it as the bass became seriously bloated.

Because the bass already extends so low and clean without boundary gain, space of up to one meter is well within the picture. Anything more and the midband will begin to lean out. If you mean to run the nuLine 34 very close to the wall, I'd use some damping perhaps with a curtain or filled bookshelf. Because the port opening is quite large, it passes a fair amount of midband information. With my undamped front wall this compromised clarity with wall reflections and led me to a final spacing of 60cm between wall and rear baffles.

More experiments pertain to tweeter setting and toe-in. On the speaker's business end sits an HF contour switch for normal, brilliant and soft. For me 'neutral' worked best. The differences weren't vast though. I'd estimate about 1-1.5dB of cut or boost. Thus even the brilliant setting was somewhat of a misnomer and doesn't require you to park the boxes behind the sofa. It's simply a gentle means to create a small infusion of freshness for more highly damped rooms. 'Soft' becomes the setting of choice for sparsely decorated spaces with plenty of hard surfaces. Clever.

Since the NuLine 34 does without a tweeter wave guide but hands over at a published 2kHz, you'd expect the soft dome to disperse very broadly at its lower reach where the 180mm mid/woofer should begin to beam. Here Günther Nubert opined during a phone call that woofer beaming is very restricted because at higher frequencies only its central diaphragm section remains active. With current Nubert speakers the ubiquitous 'Christmas tree' dispersion of earlier two-way monitors is said to have become very modest so that any placement parallel with the front wall no longer leads to disturbances from sidewall reflections. Nubert believes that controlled tweeter directivity from a wave guide is the wrong path. He cited experiments where 90% of listeners preferred a tweeter with broad off-axis response to one with a wave guide.


I'm perhaps more sensitive to this and thus still noticed the discontinuity of dispersion patterns between the drivers as a subjective emphasis of the lower treble caused by sidewall reflections as long as the boxes fired straight out. I'm sure things measure very flat on axis but in an actual listening room the neutral setting creates a bit of extra treble energy when the sidewalls aren't damped. I lucked out with toe-in which had the tweeter axes cross about a half meter before the seat. This effectively cancelled out the minor treble lift. But I still fancied the Nubert tonally more with an older somewhat warmish Harman-Kardon HK620 integrated my wife brought to our household than the cooler combo of Mace Digital Pre and Hypex Ncore monos. The latter proved though just how well the little Nubert absorbs current. The higher power of the Ncores rendered particularly transients in the action range of the mid-woofer noticeably brisker than the HK620 had.