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Delivered on a shrink-wrapped pallet and professionally strapped down side by side, each speaker/stand assembly sat in its own clearly marked double carton with precise-fitting foam end caps. I could have fit four of them inside our small two-person elevator. I easily carried each box up our outdoor stairs on one shoulder. One of them had a padded envelope for the owner's manual and a small Ziploc bag with the optional spikes. The thick plinths arrived pre-fitted with flat adjustable footers for wooden and tile flooring plus short-pile carpets. The spikes are recommended only for thick carpets which otherwise compromise stability. Removing the plastic shroud from the first speaker revealed just how compact it was - no taller than my desktop Boenicke W5se though obviously a lot wider than the Swiss wooden slivers on stilts. The combination of sand-filled pipes, massive plinth and metal-loaded polymer enclosure made the 25kg per seem unusually heavy for the very low impact on real estate and optics. Fit and finish were fully commensurate with what customers shopping this luxury sector should and will expect.


Because the Minissimo is built as a mirror-imaged pair, it can be set up 'tails' out or in. Whilst the flat portion of the baffle is identical for each, the swooping continuation of it is asymmetrical of course. Crystal Cable recommend tails in for long-wall setups with greater distances from the side walls. Tails out is standard MO for short-wall setups with more lateral boundary reinforcement. Front-wall proximity will determine acoustical LF gain as it does for all speakers. That must be experimented with for proper fine-tuning on how the Minissimo will play your room.


Belly up, we see how the bottom cover with the attached legs bolts to the unibody enclosure with 11 sunk-in Torx screws. The inset shows the plinth with its threaded furniture glides. For illustration, I replaced one of them with a short spike. The three circular recesses accommodate the leg bolts. The port ends in a typical flare with bullnosed termination. All in all, a very stylish package fully dialled for cosmetic charm plus high performance.



Break-in occurred in our upstairs two-channel video system. Here the Minissimo displaced our German Physiks HRS-120. Those 10" two-ways sport a unique top-mounted widebander. That inverted Carbon-fibre funnel handles ~200Hz-24kHz. At €13'500/pr, these compact towers go up directly against the far smaller Crystal Cable. By virtue of top-to-bottom 360° dispersion, the HRS-120 activates your room's ambient field far more completely and evenly than direct radiators can. The upshot is richer more 'reverb-enhanced' tone exactly as you'd hear it from real instruments playing your space. As a direct consequence at least for us, this speaker works far better off a direct-coupled wide-bandwidth amplifier which maximizes speed and separation. Hence Oppo's BDO-105 runs directly into Crayon's CFA-1.2 integrated. Without any adjustments to play to their personality, plonking down Gabi's winged boxes into this milieu quite predictably favoured the residents; and by a large margin. The Minissimo just couldn't compete on bass reach, tone density or that typical omni(present) involvement which stages true to life regardless of where you sit. By contrast, the blue monitors were pale, lightweight and dimensionally flat. In his Audio Beat review, Roy Gregory wrote that "the amplifier I most enjoyed with the little Crystal Cable speaker was the Border Patrol P21 EXD/EXS, a three-chassis push-pull 300B amp with a pair of power supplies that are each considerably larger (and much heavier) than the Minissimos they were driving." Such amplifiers are quite the antithesis to Bakoon, Crayon or Goldmund types which dovetail so perfectly with the vegetarian Germans. Clearly the Minissimo craved meat in its diet. For that I'd have the weighty slightly dark Pass Labs XA30.8—I expected the big Goldmund Telos 360 monos on review to be too lean—and a number of valve options to season to taste: the Fore Audio DAISy 1 DAC; the Aqua Hifi LaScala Mk II DAC; the S.A.Lab Lilt DAC/preamp; and the Nagra Jazz tube preamp. I expected particularly the Italian converter to take the Dutch boxes from a Michelle Yeoh aesthetic to full-on Sophia Loren bloom. For the menial purposes of break-in however, no changes were necessary.


About their relatively brief upstairs tenure, I'll merely add one more general observation. If you wanted the world's thinnest mechanical watch, you'd pay a lot extra without telling time any more precisely. And it might eliminate standard features like date and day displays and perhaps even a second hand. This parallels the shrinkage of speaker cabs and how the associated sonic consequences register against bigger boxes with bigger drivers. Room size, SPL and sitting distance influence that relationship. Once you want smaller than indicated by those naturally interlocking values, one begins to pursue slightly unnatural. Soon one gives up things in trade. To delay said compromise, price must rise steeply to counteract the inevitable with ever fancier drivers and more extreme enclosure tricks.


The logical upshot is that when smaller than normal becomes your aesthetic goal yet performance is supposed to not tell, expect to pay extra. A bigger speaker gets away with far less extremism to remain competitive or superior whilst offering starkly higher value. To remain in Holland, consider the €14'500 Kharma Elegance S7 which Edgar Kramer reviewed. Nobody comparing the two purely on sight—the S7 even uses the same Beryllium tweeter—would be surprised to learn that the Kharma's bass extension is greater, hence more suitable for larger spaces. As in many other industries, miniaturization costs and is also a fashion trend. Against the Kaiser Chiara and our resident EnigmAcoustics M1 super monitors, the smaller Minissimo already clearly fought with those limits. What that means in practice; and how strategic ancillary and setup choices influence it; we'll get to next.