Fruitiness. My inner chef began to think of this quality as piquant. A track which really played to it was the virtuoso "Quick Five" from the Khoury Project's Revelation album with its collisions of quicksilvery staccato elements. Tonally most appreciative was this Jazzy number from the Transatlantic Guitar Trio by injecting just the right amount of Bluesy twang. Our usual sound|kaos Vox 3awf monitors with AlNiCo-powered paper widebander in a bronze basket, upfiring Raal ribbon and dual 5¼" carbon woofers are tonally more settled. Even under what for our bigger room are happy-hour SPL, they never flip. Our smaller upstairs room didn't take SuperMon Mini to the friskier edge because my playback levels were naturally lower. The bigger downstairs could expose minor steeliness, even onset of glassiness when pushed then carelessly hit with counterproductive tracks.
Out of nerdiness, I cued up Dhafer Youssef's "Humankind". Regardless of speaker or headphone, it always trips intermodulation distortion when clarinet and voice hit their unison high notes at 4'02" then 4'27". It's like two singing bowls whose pitch is just marginally off. When those two meet, it creates that extra sharply 'rubbing' oscillation. Mini however sailed right through it without any breakup. Far pricier artillery hadn't managed before. Tip a size 64 chapeau for that stunt.
Relative to my brief of ennufity, the Mini+sub concept scored 100%. Downstairs raw SPL qualified it. Once a line crossed, these small drivers could show up a bit of shoutiness. Upstairs never crossed over to become an unqualified hit. That meant rock-solid alternative to our usual paper ScanSpeak + Mundorf AMT 6" 1st-order Acelec Model One in full rubber-bonded aluminium jacket; with a livelier sound. Whilst those €5.4K jobs don't need a sub to be complete, the Mini in free space decidedly does. With our sub, they still undercut the Dutch pair by nearly €2K. That had my attention; and should have yours!
The entrance of Brünhilde. Time for the fat lady whose 20-minute aria signals the end of Wagner's colossal Ring Cycle; and this review. This speaker is very pretty, tiny but capable. Flown solo, its port wants wall reinforcement at ideally 20cm. That makes actual bookshelf placement ideal. As useful boundary gain falls away, so does all mid bass. Now one wants a well-damped subwoofer of comparable speed to fill in. Best is a lo/hi-pass labor division at 80-100Hz. It's predictably seamless and eliminates bass from even presenting at these small voice coils. The motto is, cooler heads prevail. Now one benefits from full bandwidth without crossover in the critical 1-3kHz zone. It's the Cube/Rethm recipe in a tea cup. One gets spectacular soundstaging with point-source depth cues because common phase issues are banished; excellent projection power, obvious time cohesion and unredacted immediacy. It's vibrancy writ large. The only proviso is a reasonable foot on the gas. Don't work these drivers harder than they can stay relaxed about. At happy hour, my below setup could just a bit. Meanwhile upstairs which hifi-wise is my low-SPL lounge zone, Mini's transient clarity stripped clean of all cobwebs meant extra pleasure and intelligibility. I could play very low SPL and still be fully involved without my imagination having to fill in gaps.
When used in the nearfield as many apartment dwellers with beaucoup neighbors and thin walls will; and with the boundary rule cast in aluminium to disenfranchise a sub – automatic rev limiting is guaranteed. Nobody within ~1.5 meter from these backloaded by a close wall should ever get loud enough to cause driver stress and related brightness. Because I trust that you understood the qualifiers (reading comprehension 101), Jun Seo's baby box thus gets its first award. As I wrote earlier, it really bottles the essence of high-end sound then resurrects it in places where you'd not usually find it; like my bedroom's lowboy stuck unceremoniously in a room corner.
It's a juicy peach without any phase-delayed fuzz but proper fruit acids. It's built to a high standard. It's packed with quality ingredients including an unusual isobaric wrinkle. It's tuned for liveliness and that emotive connection. "I feel you" is the response it asked from me; and got in return. Upstairs either end of the room shall really miss thee; in free space with the Dynaudio 18S sub; or solo in my intimate nearfield zone.
It's happy days when blind dates so hit it off; and cause sadness when over. To avoid the latter, SuperMon Mini will stay on…
