When mini struts maxi. Gifted speaker auteur Anthony Gallo once explained that to him 3-4 inches are the ideal midrange Ø. With their famous soft-dome midrange, certain ATC 3-way speaker models agree. In a two-way speaker that's not a multi-paralleled line source of course, 5¼" tends to be the lower limit to put sufficient bass onto a shared cone. Norbert's Move Mini cheats that unwritten rule by calling its primary habitat the nearfield. That's routinely the desktop but needn't be. So let's make 'desktop' a stand-in for close-proximity listening. Here the smallest Lindemännchen is absolute perfection. There's deep insight, resolve and suddenness in the vocal range which eludes all but the best 6½-8" mid/woofers. Particularly when driven by the stablemate Woodnote Combo so a 25wpc/8Ω nCore amp with custom class A input buffer fed with DSD signal, the usual flipside of too much white, leanness and a top-down balance doesn't show. Instead it flops to moist textures, surprising fleshiness and believable weight on piano and upright. It's obviously no 10.3" bi-cone Zu. That American aesthetic prioritizes dynamics, tone density and image weight. The Move Mini instead proposes a refined HD sound as though superior headphones turned speakers to project the usual brain-implant panorama out into the open. This intensity is particularly strong in the nearfield. There it taunts bigger, heavier, slower and blurrier drivers to keep up. Of course their type gains once we sit at three metres in a 6x8m room and crank Yello. To add insult to paunchiness injury, Mini eliminates an energy-robbing spider. That spider would actively resist the music signal which attempts to push a cone outward to make sound. It also cancels the usual filter parts on a passive 2-way's low-pass; or a 3-way's low- and high-pass. What these eliminations do for the time domain is only known by their absence. Typical speakers with conventional mid/woofers have no means to duplicate this absence. They're none the wiser. Neither are their owners. Sorry. You can't know what you can't experience.
Not ready to capitulate? I can see your last defence-by-attack move from a mile away. "If this wonder driver is all you claim, how come I've not seen it before?" Excellent question and one most fair. I don't have a fully sanctioned answer, just educated guess. Its raw frequency response must be far too erratic for the average speaker designer to bother with. And if one must throw complex compensation networks at this to get linear, why not start with a far more normal driver?
It probably takes a rare engineer of Norbert's craftiness to recognize then fall for the Alpair's superior time-domain performance. That instantly forbids any network ballast to muck up said temporal fidelity. The only way to now have one's cake and eat it is to endlessly mess with mechanical cone tweaks, cabinet filler and dimensions plus other invisible loading addresses.
None of it can be modelled with off-the-shelf speaker-design software. It must be rinse 'n' repeat from prototype to prototype. Hello doggedness and inner resourcefulness. Hello clear sonic vision and the means to pursue it. Hello paths less taken et bonne chance. Lucky for us, Norbert's 3-years+ stubbornness paid off. His results really speak for themselves even though they're bound to be aggressively disbelieved unless actually experienced. An award is entirely inescapable. Might it persuade a few hifi pilgrims to book an audition?
Whilst regular Move is clearly similar to make my Favourites of 2024 list in the first place, my sonic proclivities actually score Mini above Move on the desktop; and Mini + sub in my smaller 2.1 system because, a/ the sub eliminates the Move's small LF advantage; b/ Mini has the superior top end and resolution; c/ Mini saves €1'400 shekels. Lindemann's Mini really is maximally excellent.
Postscript: This review deliberately focused on the speakers not streaming integrated. That's because I'm old-school with predominantly local files to much prefer a direct USB link to swarming my tunes across the LAN. Whilst the Woodnote Combo accommodates S/PDIF, its primary focus is wireless or wired networking via the dedicated Lindemann app. To properly peg those chops wants LAN-surfing reviewers. That said, had I upgrade funds for my desktop sound, I'd buy the Combo/Mini bundle and move the Laiv DAC and Enleum amp to other uses, the present €18.6K monitors to backup duty. That alone might tell you something?
Publisher's addenum July 7th, 2025: "Just a quick note to say thanks again for the great review of our Move Mini. Really enjoyed reading it and your take on the speaker was spot on. There's some good news to share. The price of the Mini just dropped from €1'800 to €1'390/pr. We've decided to sell it exclusively through our own web shop. As you probably know, dealing with speakers in the traditional dealer model can be tricky especially when margin expectations go a bit overboard. This way we can offer the Mini at a much more attractive price without compromising on quality or production which is still made in Germany of course! No idea if you ever update reviews after their release but we thought you might like to know. All the best from Germany." – Christopher & Norbert
