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Pleasingly nobody at Teufel HQ had gone after the typical bathroom tub response of flat mids and absurdly elevated bass and treble to ‘transcend’ their modest physical dimensions. Quite the contrary. Particularly the top end was nicely mellow but still mature to avoid all sharpness or emphasis. The track’s second part rocks a lengthily developing guitar solo that ends in proper chaos. Here the Cubes showed impressive staying power to dish out above room levels with energetic power but no indications of screaming or distortion. With such a reasonable voicing I was well reminded of Linn’s Kiko system which I’d reviewed a year ago. For its price you could have gotten six complete Cube stereo sets…
   
After my dose of handcrafted music it was time for more artifice. At times I deliberately reach deep into my drawer to dig up weird stuff. Here I rescued Visage’s Fade to Grey which to this day impresses. The Cubes built up the song with nice dynamics and managed to cleanly distinguish between the hissy synth drums and late-arriving real percussion. The stereo effects across a broad ping-ping panorama came off clean and accurate too. From here it was a short step to the Fleet Foxes’ Blue Ridge Mountains. Again I was impressed by how clean and well-sorted the staging spread out. Behind the acoustic guitars and also vocals sit cubits of reverb to suggest a big space. Even on the bookshelf this communicated. As far as possible under such circumstances, the sound nicely disconnected from the physical boxes to float.
 

 

Only in the last third of the cut did I notice a few oversights of micro resolution when into this echo-laden sauce various backup singers and more percussion segue in. That’s quite a challenge for any playback system which my 16 x as costly reference system does with more air, clarity and sorting. Obviously far more coin does buy something extra. Duh. Time to move into bigger digs.

In free space I fed the Berliners with rawer fare. That was Land of the Lost by the American band Wipers which toured as a dark Punk Rock trio during the 1980s. Again I dug the performance. The wirier than guttural bass was proper fun and the guitar runs embellished with plenty of pull-off showed proper substance. At room volume and slightly above the Cubes sounded tonally quite mature and together even in the bass. This of course changed when I stepped seriously on the gas. The higher the SPL, the more compression kicked in, albeit not of the nasty sort (no scratching, no screaming) but rather as successively diminishing resolution and differentiation. Pesky Physics and all.

With music of less extreme response, the Cubes cut a swell figure in the living room. For my tastes Shostakovich’s Concerto N°2 in D-major contains one of the most beautiful piano movements extant. Its "Andante" follows a sad minor-mode prelude with a single tone which together with the orchestra introduces the major mode for a true Hallmark moment. And I was shocked by how big and clean the Cubes pulled off this orchestral illusion. Apparently the coaxial driver solution crosses off both point-source dispersion and timing integration for true seriousness of purpose.