Going to 11. For whatever reason, the human voice does it for widebanders. Obviously no speaker driver can tell apart signal to treat vocals special. Still, most of us notice extra magic when premium widebanders caress voices. If you're in a sexy mood and could do with an instant vacation to mellow Brazilian rhythms, occasional echoes of Cape Verde's barefoot diva Cesaria Evora even some emotive Portuguese guitar, I find little as inspiring as Anna Maria Jopek's Sobremesa replete with stunning duets. Whilst I'm not into men that way, when Paulo de Carvalho lays on the heavy seduction vibes as her duet partner on "Mae Negra", I could have blushed and checked my heartbeat. Them be saucy words for raw in-room presence. This goes beyond schmaltz for the ears. It reaches deeper. Chicken pimples as a Serbian listener once called goosebumps. The same went for the crying guitar from Portugal which followed. Its elastic languor and melancholy tone rubbed it in not out. It didn't hurt that these were good production values. They had Hagen² go to town with ultra-precise placement allocations across the full breadth of my front wall. Freaky soundstaging and tonal fruitiness were key attractors.

But the full red-carpet treatment came from the emotional link-up with the various singers. It didn't hurt either that the front end was a twin stack of Cen.Grand's best so their new GLD1.0 Deluxe streamer with novel I²S over fibre-optics + BNC transmission sans USB into the DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe set to 1'024DSD resampling. How would an unsuspecting novice pulled in off the street then pushed into the hot seat react? "This sounds fricking huge" could be one response. True enough. It did. "Whoa, I had no idea a hifi could be this exciting. While I can't see anyone, it feels like they're actually here jamming their bleeding hearts us." Just as apt. "I'm lost for words. I just had a bit of an out-of-body experience. Could I just be still and sit with it?" Bring it on. I multiplied myself into fictitious people to create distance from my audiophile persona. Ordinary people untrained in critical listening connect with basics; or not at all. Basics are simple. The experience doesn't squeeze out of the transducers like dry toothpaste. It hovers freely in the air like a fragrance or breeze just far more corporeal. It communicates excitement. It projects presences. It triggers emotional reactions. None of it requires audiophile vocabulary or training to notice and partake of.

What a hifi and in particular its loudspeakers as the final translators of electrical signal into mechanical motion must do is gush. A hifi can't be a reluctant miserly trickle like a stuck-up faucet. It must feel free, generous, tacit, enormous. It can't do monochromatic. It must paint all across the rainbow. It can't seem stiff and mechanical like a military parade. It must be fluid like a stage dancer. With Alberich² in pride of place, all that took place, was in place and what my place just then was all about. Many subliminal reminders that inanimate machines and mechanical devices were responsible had dropped. I won't claim that they all up and left to suddenly sound like the real thing. But enough such reminders had stepped out to make it feel most real. That the sound too was excellent was a mere bonus. What more could I possibly say to drive home that this latest Voxativ is special?

With its dual 15-inchers, my usual RiPol sub can run mono or stereo. I do the latter. One mono amp per woofer represents one channel so stereo bass, albeit in a mono location. Whilst Alberich² shrinks its woofers to 12" and in the MDF version also cab inertia, their locations are standard stereo. Many people claim that below 100Hz recorded bass is mostly mono. I can't confirm or deny that other than share that with my upstairs mono sub or the mono location of my downstairs stereo version, I've never noticed. Yet with Alberich²'s broader physical spread, I seemed to have gained some foundational solidity. So stereo subs in a time-aligned cosmetically ideal location are another Voxativ special here. It's the old Buddhist bagel joke. "What do you want on it?" "Make me one with everything." That's relevant when standalone RiPol subs don't grow on trees. Those by sound|kaos and ModalAkustik don't come in lacquers or build in electronics. Those from MP&S Klangwelten might offer a custom colour match and include electronics but their smaller pair will set you back €14K, close to what today's complete stack gets. Børresen offer black lacquer, possibly white and build in remote-controlled electronics but their 4 x 8" unit costs even more. Alberich² really is the go-to choice. For still more choice and seeing how we already met the Buddhist bagel, let's head for the drive-in to see what other flavour profiles different amps may let us take out. For suitable alternates I had a Crayon CFA-1.2 and Simon Audio Lab i5. These integrateds offer 64/50wpc into 8Ω respectively and variable pre-outs for the RiPol subs. These rounds eliminated my external analog xover to run Hagen² wide open as designed. If Marie Adler considers the option of a built-in high pass attractive, perhaps Hagen3 might get it? As is, Hagen² doesn't have one so it made sense to run it accordingly.

The Crayon was too Enleum-like to mosey onward. My inner greed wanted more of a gap. Here the little i5 brick from Seoul proposed alternate facts. Its designer is friendly with Mark Levinson the man and calls his own motto "soft power" as a nod at a more retro aesthetic than modern obsession with ultra-pixel resolution.

That's exactly what manifested. The prior night's full-frontal immersion into extreme res mellowed. Whilst that diluted some vocal sex on the well-recorded Sobramesa, it treated Rafael Cortés' Espada de Fuego more kindly. Where Vicente Amigo would never allow his guitar to trend even minorly into the steely, on this album the 12-fingered flamenco technician from Germany creates timbres which suggest rusty steel strings on thin glass not tone wood. With a 5" widebander of Hagen²'s reflexes, that recorded heat reflects uncut. It's there so a truth teller must report it.

Just so Simon Lee's class AB Mosfet circuit of soft power did what its credo promised. It made Rafael's choices more palatable. It sent them to the meat-packing district, Wagner to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. That shaved off some edge. It traded intensity of in-room presences for a mellower more autumnal mien. Perhaps more to the point, it showed how this boutique speaker in its dressy gloss doesn't need costly boutique triodes to come on song.

The upshot was equally poignant. The more direct and unfettered a transducer, the more clearly it responds to ancillary swaps. Baked into that statement is another. We'll only mine Alberich²'s ultimate insight potential if we precede it with premium kit. Leave the lesser caboodle to lesser speakers. On rating my kit and caboodle, how did Alberich² fare against my usual Qualio IQ? On high-frequency airs and associated effects, the combination of dipole 6" SB Acoustics Satori widebander and dipole Mundorf ATM in the IQ had the advantage. On raw resolution I'd give the judgement to Voxativ. On room-happier more articulate bass, Voxativ took it as well over Qualio's passive ported alignment. On dovetailing best with my electronics, Qualio grabbed it. No wonder, it's how I built my system. For Alberich² my dream amp would probably be a FirstWatt SIT4. That said, I was far from slumming it with the small Simon Lee. Au contraire. Regardless, Alberich² flutters at its best between our prior Schmetterling so fragile butterfly up to live Jazz quartet SPL. Once we breach the Schmettern zone of a dozen orchestral brasses at full tilt—3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 5 French horns, 1 tuba—we'll encounter some compression stress which has the HF lead.