Srajan
Arachnophobia. Most people dislike the entire species, especially the hand-sized furry sorts. Audiophiles meanwhile are arachnophoniacs though virtually never aware of it. What the funk? Spiders. They are the usually corrugated resin-impregnated cloth circles behind dynamic driver diaphragms to help centre their voice coils and provide restorative force on the return. What goes out must come back in. As such they’re part of the driver’s moving mass of membrane, surround, voice coil, its former and the inner suspension called spider. Trouble is, our music signal must push our domes or cones out to make sound whilst spiders actively resist. They act as springs which only expand with applied force whilst siphoning off some of said force in the process. That makes them lossy energy-absorptive critters. Force eaters. Except for Belgium’s Illumnia whose radically different drivers do away with both spiders and surrounds; for Audio Physic who eliminate spiders for their best drivers; for China’s Mark Audio transducer house whose Alpair widebanders do likewise – I’m unaware of other drive units which take arachnophobia or fear of spiders all the way by simply wiping the species out.
Lindemann’s aptly named Move Mini monitor—henceforth just Mini—takes the theme of elimination further. If spiders absorb and store energy, so do passive crossovers. Mini’s 4” Mark Audio 3rd-gen Alpair 5 copper-tone cone runs filterless like a bygone Camel cigarette; and for the same reason. “Don’t filter for a better stronger taste.” Hifi lingo translates better and stronger taste as musical energy and resolution aka immediacy. More of what the signal encodes makes it through the mechanical loudspeaker contrivance to our ears. At 15kHz on a single-pole so 1st-order high pass enters a small AMT for some upper harmonic sparkle and air. That pleated tweeter sits inside an oval waveguide turned sideways to broaden off-axis radiation. Highly compressed Swiss compact density fibreboard aka CDF “is even stiffer than aluminium yet our deliberately thin 12mm panels exhibit far lower energy storage than MDF or HDF. Internal foam liner active from 300 to 600Hz cancels remaining box resonance and the 3mm outer aluminium baffle is another deliberate tuning element. Even Mark Audio’s voice coil is special and implements certain tricks from the white cone of Yamaha’s famous studio monitor.”
Knowing now what goes into our 14 x 24 x 26½cm WxHxD light-grey box, what comes out? 60Hz- 36kHz bandwidth, 85dB sensitivity. Both specs seem lowish on paper but prove anything but in the right reality. We’re obviously not talking ballroom raves. That’d be like using a jeweller’s screwdriver to loosen a car’s tyre nuts. But alight onto the desktop where close-proximity coherence reigns supreme, where lower SPL are mandatory to protect one’s hearing, where maximum intelligibility is key to hearing everything at levels low enough to think and get any work done… in that alternate reality, Mini is the bomb. Its €1800/pair buy-in smoked my 8 times costlier heavier bigger classic two-way EnigmAcoustics M1 monitor which served my desktop before the Lindemännchen—the German diminutive for little men—hopped aboard.
They performed their successful class warfare off the banana posts of Lindemann’s 25wpc nCore Woodnote Combo, a petite streaming integrated amp with purely digital inputs, analog volume, class A op-amp inputs, class D outputs and automatic PCM-to-DSD conversion via AKM chip. At €2250, that munchkin likewise ate the breakfast of my €6500 Enleum integrated by creating even wetter tone and eliminating a small amount of port bloat which Enleum’s far higher output Ω didn’t completely control. At €4050 all in for the Mini + Combo combo, 3m spring-loaded banana- terminated speaker cable included as well as the company’s own control app and UPnP control –in my case accessed through Audirvana–the Bavarian threesome in its virtual Lederhosen hawking pretzels and Steins at a Münchner Bierfest caused my desktop’s status quo a lot of grief. On 2024’s very last day, I figured out a way to approximate it by rejigging stuff I already owned. That tale poked fun at audiophile gigantomania with its title Shockford-on-Shannon.
When is enough enough? If you ask me, it’s when upright bass and piano sound sufficiently substantial and complete to cause no ‘let’s play something else instead’ reaction. Even though my ownership of a 2 x 15” sub just one room over knew what at the very bottom was merely hinted at, I had to actively turn my mental bean counter on to register it. ‘Just listening’ as in taking my playback on its own merit, Mini made the best sound my Irish desktop has produced yet. What does that dirty four-letter word ‘best’ mean in this context?
1./ Suchness. That word is a mental drawer into which I throw directness and live-wire connectedness as a lowering of energetic reluctance. Think about walking through loose sand then on wooden planks. For the same amount of physical effort, the springy smooth planks generate a freer faster gait. We traverse more distance. We do so easier. It’s nothing we must ponder. It’s a very obvious physical reaction instantly clocked by our perception. Wherever our inner walker has a choice, “no more sand” is the quick conclusion.
2./ Focus. That word is a mental drawer into which I throw contrast ratio and holographic imaging. It’s when despite the physical barrier of my 34” curved computer monitor, soundstage depth and left-to-right sorting completely obliterate the barrier. Think out-of-skull headfi projected nearly 2 metres across and somewhat beyond the front wall. The sense of hardwired intimacy is similar, the scale vastly enhanced.
3./ Resolution. That word is a mental drawer into which I throw tone and ambient retrieval. Tone is a function of harmonics whose homeopathic doses in the higher orders rely on digging deep into the planktonic realm. Ambient retrieval is a function of recorded reflections which like shadows or ghosts blitz around and behind images to show venue depth and shared space. Such reflections too often occur at very low recorded levels. If we mean to play lower levels to begin with, the microscopic stuff is first to fall below the audibility threshold. Spatial 3D coordinates soften, tone modulations narrow in scope, distinctive details wash out. Higher resolution means literally hearing more of the homeopathic aspects at ever-lower playback SPL. Key contributors to high resolution are a very low noise floor and minimized losses inside the playback mechanism.
Now we’re right back where we started. By eliminating spiders and any high or low-pass electrical filter on all of music’s fundamentals minus the bottom 1.5 octaves, Mini is a transducer which passes on more of the signal. Less is lost in transit. By eliminating the higher noise of linear power supplies and their slower recovery times then optimizing current delivery with lower output impedance for superior damping, the matching Combo streamer/amp raises the same stakes. As it turns out, Norbert Lindemann’s recipe of DSD über alles into a class A input buffer for the class D output stage produces glossy colour-intense tone from 4-inch widebanders in the nearfield. This is not skeletal, haggard, go-nowhere-fast sound by any stretch of Red Bull. Neither is the small driver tipped up, forward or whitish; nor in any way lacking in air or appropriate bite when plucked strings blister or muted trumpets spray odd harmonics.
Without a sub, that rosy picture grows thorns once we sit much farther away to play ever louder more bombastic stuff. For that Lindemann do the regular Move with its bigger widebander; and a companion sub to which that can dock magnetically. Mini’s response just won’t dovetail with that stablemate Groove sub. You’ll want to bring your own. I did in my upstairs rig with a dual 9½” force-cancelling sealed Dynaudio from their Pro division. I used a 70Hz active 4th-order analogue crossover with mirror-imaged high and low pass. Hello, 25Hz bandwidth and wall-to-wall imaging without a trace of its origins.
Run solo, Mini’s primary habitat is the nearfield of a desktop, snug or home office. It’s a very specialized tool looking for the right job. With the deck shuffled in its favour, I can’t think of anything that for my tastes trumps it. On a desktop, bigger is not better. Au contraire. True, €4K in total is a pot of gold in an app where many rely on plasticky active boxes or call it quits with earbuds. So one must write a royal decree that a man’s desktop is his castle and muse so to hell with compromise. Part of the decree is knowing what’s required, what’s overkill or counterproductive. How loud do you play your desktop? Is a hinted-at 48Hz sufficient?
If these are dry numbers, listening is the only cure to understand what they mean in the real world not theory. That listening needn’t be complicated. Simply play your regular music and select tracks which you expect might give Mini indigestion. If nothing of the sort occurs, what more needs doing? It’s how our head can stand in the way of even trying something that could be perfect. It’s why on my site, Mini walked off with an award. It’s a flashing red light. “Hey, pay attention!” Having Zoomed with Norbert Lindemann and knowing of his HighEnd past which today leverages his 30+ years of experience at price points within reach of ordinary folks without second homes and yachts, I did pay attention when first word spread that the brand would soon have new speakers. It’s really paid off.
But it leaves a question. If this driver in this box is all I claim—I own the same driver in an isobaric config with very high add-on AMT in MonAcoustic’s Mini in my upstairs system to have me walk the talk—why haven’t we seen it more widely? My educated guess is simple. Its raw frequency response is likely far too wonky for the average software-modelling speaker designer to consider. Now it takes an experienced very clever engineer like Norbert to spend four years to achieve with apparently basic cabinet design and a tiny mechanical cork damper on the central cone what others would use baffle-step, notch and impedance correction filters to enforce only to compromise what arachnophobia enables in the first place.
There’s one final big distinction. Timing. If you’ve never heard what a properly designed widebander does for the time domain, you lack a core reference. You can’t remove the crossovers from your current multi-way speakers then magically time-align their drivers to test the difference. Now it’s easy to dismiss the topic by instead focusing on the amplitude domain and declare its measured flatness the supreme arbiter. Here I’ll propose that like vinyl vs digital, tubes vs transistors, horns vs omnis vs panels, feedback vs none, class A vs D vs whatever, widebanders are a rite of audiophile passage. They are a necessary stepping stone towards a reasonably comprehensive understanding of achievable flavours and playback styles. Having considerable experience with widebanders from Rethm to Voxativ, Cube to Zu, Bastanis to Zugspitz, Camerton to sound|kaos and Audience, I find Lindemann’s latest Move Mini the possibly easiest candidate which facilitates exposure to proper widebander virtues. It fulfils the genre’s mission statement to a very high degree in an unusually compact and priced package. Prepare to be rattled; even to develop arachnophobic symptoms by suddenly spotting what normal drivers and electrical filters do to very specific performance qualities. This we only learn by contrast.
Here it’s all about immediacy, energy, communicativeness, timing, resolution, and denuded clarity. Until then, these are mere words. Afterwards, they transform into experienced essence. That’s when pennies drop. Should your listening priorities mirror mine, a penny could now get stuck on this speaker genre. If not, at least you’ll know what it’s all about. It just takes exposure to a proper specimen. When used in the nearfield and especially when preceded by its stablemate Woodnote Combo, Lindemann’s Move Mini is precisely that: a very finely tuned showcase for a rare speaker niche presented here in an attractively modern and compact ported form factor that goes places which big single-driver rear horns do not.
Further information: Lindemann
