When looking at the front of the Divina Minor, we identified a 12cm Seas Excel mid/woofer with chromed phase plug. The tweeter was from ScanSpeak's Illuminator range. These are good drivers. When the necessary crossover contains resistors, coils, capacitors and hookup wiring of equivalent pedigree, build costs add up. Then factor a composite cabinet—the documentation mentions multiple layers of MDF, fir and thick polyutherane—done with European labor and overhead and the impact on the final sell price compounds..

Taking a close look, we spotted lacquer which wasn't perfectly smooth. It suffered a little orange peel effect albeit minor. All edges except for the bottom were rounded. The tweeter and mid/woofer mounted flush to the baffle, the latter's mounting bolts protruded. The port was in the back above a pair of heavy-duty 5-way binding posts. The metal plate below had been mounted off-kilter and certain information added with thick black felt pen.

Continuing their departure from expected luxury indicated by price, the bottom treatment was disappointing: rough-cut felt patches without any option for screw-in footers. This Divina Minor promised bandwidth of 57Hz up to 44kHz ±3dB with a 2'100Hz filter hinge and 85.5dB sensitivity

To prove our Milanese pudding by eating, we mounted the small Italians on massive concrete stands in our smaller downstairs listening room. We started off with a PTP Blok20 integrated amplifier and Mytek Brooklyn Bridge all-in-one source gussied up with a Farad external power supply. With plenty of musical content from Qobuz and Tidal, we were ready for some intense listening.

On the ECM recording White Night, Stephan Micus plays guitars, regular and bass duduk, cymbals, kalimba, sinding, dondon, cane whistles, nay and even sings. When we heard this for the first time, we were completely overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of music which this multi-multi instrumentalist recorded. Think of the introvert melancholic duduk as found with the Hadouk Trio meandering over a background of African thumb piano. Other tracks feature multiple 14-string guitars or a plethora of Indian cane whistles. Of course this meant plenty of overdubs as something rare for ECM but the result is gorgeous.