Once freed from its packaging, the V01 quickly reveals why dimensions matter. This speaker isn't visually shy. Its footprint is slim and elegant but depth and distinctive top-mounted ice-cream cone give it a presence hard to ignore. It doesn't mimic the familiar Boenicke aesthetic either. While Sven's speakers are known for their gently tilted ultra-slim enclosures with round flowing edges, the V01 comes across as more grounded, angular and, for lack of a better word, a bit chubby. The visual execution clearly follows a different script—less organic sculpture, more deliberate contrast between retro cues and contemporary minimalism. The fabric-clad front held in place magnetically introduces a subtle 60s vibe, the aluminium front baffle and tweeter bullet keep things firmly anchored in the present. On fit 'n' finish this is a fully mature effort executed to a very high standard. Tolerances are tight, the woodwork is excellent and a sense of luxury permeates the entire package. It's the kind of design that doesn't demand attention outright yet once noticed, tends to hold. There's more to it than that and on a somewhat subjective note, I came to appreciate its looks. While it didn't impress instantly, that changed over the course of several days. Behind that tidy, tastefully executed exterior sits a construction that's anything but conventional. Instead of the two-part wooden clamshell typical for Boenicke  designs, the V01 employs a three-layer solid wood cab of varying wall thicknesses. It's pigmented, oiled and internally reinforced by a network of slotted wood or cardboard tubes, the latter partially open but filled with insulating wool to not reduce the enclosure's volume. This cost-effective solution is anything but crude. It stiffens the housing and effectively breaks up internal standing waves. Add felt liner across all interior surfaces and you end up with a cabinet that's not a dead concrete box but a controlled acoustic environment that deliberately behaves more like an instrument than lead coffin.

The driver complement follows its own logic. The heavy lifting is handled by an 8" long-throw mid/woofer manufactured by SPK Audio exclusively for this application. Its cone and former are paper, the coil windings aluminium to reduce moving mass and improve responsiveness. An ash phase plug and maple element mounted directly to the magnet fine-tune resonance behaviour. The same philosophy applies to the 2" wideband driver with aluminium cone also sourced from SPK Audio and mounted in an aluminium bullet cone atop the cabinet. Both drivers feature neoprene rings to reduce diffraction and share the same mechanical tuning that has become a Boenicke hallmark. All of it is part of a broader effort to let the drivers behave as intended. The third driver is where things get slightly less obvious. A 1" rear-firing tweeter manufactured by Lucky Sound specifically for this purpose handles ambient duties. It's a simple unit on paper—plastic diaphragm, wide dispersion—but its role is far from trivial. Rather than act as a primary treble source, it injects spatial information into the room and extends the soundstage well beyond the speakers. It's lightly filtered, low in impedance and very much part of the system's spatial tuning rather than its tonal backbone. It's there to enhance the illusion, not carry the load. Given that ambient tweeters are a staple of Boenicke designs, their presence in the V01 comes as no surprise.

Where the V01 really separates from the pack is how these drivers mount. Both mid/woofer and widebander suspend—literally. The former hard-couples to an internal baffle attached to the main front panel on the bottom while the neoprene ring separating this transducer from the enclosure allows for a meaningful degree of movement. Meanwhile the wideband driver inside its flared housing decouples from the cabinet via fine carbon strings. Gently nudged, it rocks back and forth for a while. This approach, in spirit borrowed from the flagship W22, comes from Piotr being so impressed by the design that he asked Sven to incorporate elements of it into the V01. The purpose of Sven's driver suspension system is to minimize the transfer of mechanical energy generated by the transducers into the cabinet and crucially, prevent delayed reflections from feeding back into them. This is highly unusual engineering that I haven't encountered in any speakers other than the W22. Electrically things remain deliberately simple. The crossover is a hand-wired 6dB/oct. affair with transition points at 1'500 and 6'000Hz. The 8" driver hands over gently to the wideband unit at the very shallow lower transition while the upper low-pass introduces additional curve shaping of the widebander to achieve a more linear acoustic response with the rear tweeter. There's no aggressive filtering, no steep crossover slopes forcing compliance. Instead, the V01 relies on wide inter-driver overlap and careful mechanical tuning to achieve coherence. Signal transfer is handled by LessLoss hookup wiring that's  cryogenically treated and cotton-insulated while KZK capacitors and a low-impedance coil take care of the minimal electrical filtering. It's a classic case of doing less electrically so more can happen acoustically.

The entire assembly sits on three solid-maple discs held captive in round recesses milled into the bottom. The rectangular rear port integrated into a nicely finished steel plate sits deliberately high to minimize floor bounce for a cleaner bass response. Just above the floor sits a set of WBT NextGen copper terminals mounted on a steel plate tucked into a semi-open compartment which has some practical implications. Speaker cables terminated with banana or BFA connectors won't pose issues but large spades on stiff leads might. This is more of a reviewer's complaint than anything. During evaluation, our kind tends to swap cables frequently. Regular users won't do that to make it a minor one-time inconvenience at most. With that out of the way, let's move onto what the V01 can and cannot do. Knowing Sven's previous designs, I already had a fairly clear idea on what to expect. Before it ever landed in my room, I needed the right amplifier.

Enter Aavik's I-588, a class D affair in a beautifully executed enclosure that delivers 300wpc/8Ω and twice that into 4Ω. Its triple-zero output impedance is an order of magnitude lower than that of my Trilogy 995R monos which makes it a far more suitable partner for this kind of load. For that reason the Aavik became my primary amp for this assignment. My usual digital front end remained unchanged: LampizatOr Horizon360 DAC fed by Innuos Statement Next-Gen handling server/streaming duties. Lastly, the V01 had to compete with my W11 SE+ floorstanders. Swapping between both side by side proved enjoyably straightforward. All it took was muting playback, moving the Boenicke S3 speaker cables on external Firewall modules from one to the other, unmuting and hitting play. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary. Done.