Of course my command of Wagner is on the level of Willy Wonka. I never read the book nor saw any movie adaptations. I have heard purely instrumental Wagnerian excerpts in ouvertures and preludes—you'd expect no less with two siblings playing the French horn in German opera orchestras—but my allergy to operatic voices especially sopranos can't stomach Wagner's full-fat assaults. Give me symphonic Bruckner or Tchaikovsky instead. I played Bruckner's 4th and Tchaikovsky's 4th and 6th as a young man to have a special affinity for their musical language. But the experience was rather more oceanic inside the orchestra. Hearing the Montreux symphony because our neighbours were volunteer ushers who gave us free tickets was a more distanced thus abstract experience. Today my typical playback diet goes rather light on large-scale orchestral. After living the real thing for a few formative years whilst studying classic clarinet at the conservatory, the canned stuff no matter how gold-plated feels like a tuna-tin tempest. Given Alberich's temporary residence in my digs, I obviously had to make allowances. I settled on Wagner's Tannhäuser Ouverture then worked Qobuz through numerous options before I found one I liked; Cincinatti under López-Cobos. Here's a curio. Germans call a butterfly a Schmetterling. Meanwhile their verb 'schmettern' means to blare, bray, bellow or belt out. Think Wagnerian brasses. It's how we morph from bombastic to fragile just by adding 'ling'. How did Alberich² acquit itself on Sir Richard? During massed peaks, the higher string sections got just a bit forward. That's a quite typical tendency for smaller widebanders. I'd not noticed it on regular fare which lacks equivalent dynamic range. When the latter uncorked like a shaken bottle of champagne, the small drivers got just a bit exuberant in the 2nd octave above middle C. I tend to think that massed violins are unusually critical because microscopic intonation offsets of 16 unison players in the first section and 14 in the second trigger subliminal stridency far easier than single instruments do. Hence I didn't think this speaker completely groomed for this type fare at least not with my wide-bandwidth class AB transistor amp. Here a FirstWatt or valve specimen should really earn its keep.

To be sure, this had naught doing with imaging or sorting. As we'd expect from virtual point sources, both were ace. This was about a small shift in tonality during peaks with massed strings which I consider to be the most critical of all instruments in that regard. If you're like me and don't partake in recreating an 80-strong orchestra inside a 6x8m room at what some call 'realistic' levels, you won't enter that zone of minor heat. Whilst we have these two shots of my setup on screen, be sure to mentally delete the 2×15" RiPol sub in the middle. It wasn't playing or needed. The two Gold Note monos hidden behind it which usually power these woofers weren't, either. Ditto the two visible mono amps on the Artesanía stands. If Alberich² stayed on, all of that would disappear. You'd only see the tiny Enleum amp and active crossover. Given this hardware vomit, it seemed an important reminder. Meanwhile Voxativ's width is less than half of my usual Qualio IQ bass bins. Voting Alberich² shrinks even the visual real estate of the transducers without sacrificing real bandwidth. These little stacks are rather packed. Having now done the equivalent of taking a little 2-door car for a test drive down a rutted access road for forest rangers to see whether anything might rattle, it was time to return to music I usually cue up. That said, reviewers who never use classical to challenge speakers rob themselves of what I see as the most telling test. If anything is even slightly off, a big orchestra shows it easier than anything else. You might counter that if you've never heard a symphony to know what it's supposed to sound like, my test would fail. Perhaps. Given my upbringing around instruments, I simply don't know what it's like not to know. I certainly don't know what synths and electronica are supposed to sound like. It's why I default to acoustic instruments when I do critical assessments.

I love the Tord Gustavsen piano trio and Anouar Brahem's work with Anja Lechner on ECM. Spinning up some examples ticked all the boxes. There was lightning responsiveness to microdynamic turns. That magnified melodic or rhythmic emphasis on certain inflection points or beats. Those aspects are akin to a a great orator's cadence which weighs certain words extra to underscore meaning. Gifted musicians do this without words. Bass clarinet had woody throatiness, oud its trademark virile bluster. Piano impressed with the weight of the left hand. Double bass had just the right degree of rotundity to sidestep artificial dryness.

Spinning up master DJ Mercan Dede aka Arkin Allen [right] who mixes traditional Turkish instruments like ney, clarinet, oud and spiked fidde with quarter-tone trombone, synths, drums and vocals, I dove into deeply layered soundscapes with infrasonic elements and exceptionally specific image placement. On this kind of music, low-bass support of excellent control is essential. That's perhaps the prime differentiator between Alberich² and its Ampeggio or Nenuphar alternates. It's not just active bass backed by stiff transistor muscle which goes that extra mile over resonant passive bass. It's bass which is demonstrably less room interactive to avoid throwing blur and mud at the widebander's ever more directional bandwidth. In that sense one can think of these bass bins as acoustic room treatments. They don't cancel all LF reflections of course. It's why I still use PSI Audio's active bass traps in these front corners. But RiPol woofers won't trigger our transverse room mode which in a short-wall layout of a normal-sized room often sits at ~70-80Hz to be particularly aggravating. Cancelling that is a big benefit. Ditto for reducing the lingering blurry elements of all-over bass reflections. That's back at my earlier sniper image and ever more useful as we prime the pump in bigger rooms.

Alberich is a prime example of a speaker that combines typical monitor virtues with those of a mature tower. Its bass prowess doesn't steal from imaging magic, its quickness doesn't drift into whitishness because of that 12" anchor deep in the rich black soil of true low bass. Though mentioned twice already, it bears repeating that Alberich² also avoids the routine annoyance of plate-amp hum. One could arguably wish that the bass attenuator sat on a far shallower gradient to come on massively slower. I needed very little rotation to play loud enough.