關於 high roll meaning ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

Alumine Five of Stenheim

Stenheim is a relatively late entrant to the high-end speaker field. It was founded in 2010 by a collective of mainly ex-Goldmund engineers, and its products have inherited an unmistakable aesthetic and, to a lesser extent, sonic DNA, although it was a significantly evolved character that was to emerge in the shape of the debut model, the compact, two-way Alumine Two. It’s a developmental divergence that has continued and, if anything, accelerated with the emergence of each subsequent product. The latest Stenheim speakers, developed under the auspices of new owner Jean-Pascal Panchard, definitely have their own, unambiguous identity, both visually and musically.

I’ve been seriously looking forward to the arrival of the Alumine Five. Previous experience with the brand has included impressive exposure to the various versions of the enormous and enormously impressive Ultime Reference models, as well as a brief but highly rewarding flirtation with the stand-mounted Alumine Two in my own system. The possibility of combining the sense of musical articulation, enthusiasm and communication I experienced from the Alumine Two, with more than a hint of the clarity, scale and authority so effortlessly delivered by the Reference models, all in a package that, if not exactly affordable, at least isn’t completely out of the question, makes the Alumine Five a distinctly interesting proposition.

Yet, confronted with the Alumine Five in the flesh, there’s little to hint at the extraordinary promise lurking within. Resolutely rectangular in true Stenheim style, the Five’s aluminum cabinet, with its plate-to-plate construction, stands just 48" tall, 15" deep and presents a broad 11" face to the world, dimensions based on golden-ratio numbers. The front baffle is split by a physical break between the upper midrange-treble enclosure and the lower bass cabinet, independently ported by the laminated full-width slots above and below, a physical separation that is mirrored by the contrasting inlaid strips that help visually break up the one-piece side panels. The regular lines, smooth surfaces, flawless matte finish and lack of visible fixings could easily result in a bland, almost featureless appearance. But those trim strips and the offset midrange and treble drivers do just enough to give the Five a subtle hint of individual style without resorting to the sort of gauche and ostentatious flourishes that so often pass as design.

The result is a refreshingly clean, classical appearance that will blend seamlessly with a range of different decors. Despite the lack of grilles (although they are available as an option, does anybody really spend this kind of money on a speaker and then compromise the performance by fitting covers?), the beautifully profiled baffle and absence of visible fixings makes for a genuinely neat, finished appearance that matches the superb surface finish on the cabinet. The end result just looks right, in a way that makes you wonder why you’d want grilles anyway.

The first hint of its potent sonic capabilities comes when you try to pick it up. Each comparatively compact cabinet tips the scales at 220 pounds. That’s a grunt-inducing, two-man lift. Now, take a look at the figures for bandwidth and sensitivity, and an in-room response that digs down as far as 28Hz combined with 94dB efficiency should raise your eyebrows, especially given the compact cabinet dimensions. Which brings us to the first experiential disconnect: boxes this size shouldn’t produce this much bass or do it so easily. Nor should they weigh so much -- although therein lies the clue to this particular conundrum. When it comes to bass extension, it’s not the external dimensions of the box that matter, but its internal volume. Just like the Crystal Cable Minissimo, a thin-wall cabinet makes for a much larger internal volume than the external dimensions might suggest -- especially if we apply the expectations of more conventional wood-based construction. Throw in the sheer weight of the aluminum panels and the combination of mass and physical dimensions would subconsciously suggest massively thick walls -- and a correspondingly limited internal volume. Instead, what we have here is a deceptively large volume, which, combined with the inertia of the heavy cabinet and the mechanical stability provided by the material, makes for an effective mechanical reference for driver movement, meaning that more of the energy your amplifier sticks into the speaker comes out as sound and (at least in theory) it will be more precisely rendered.

So far, not very much that’s new. It’s not like Stenheim (or Magico, or YG Acoustics) has exclusivity when it comes to aluminum cabinets. But what does make Stenheim different is the unique material they use in damping their cabinet panels. Of course, the separate enclosures and the internal baffles they demand make for an inherently heavily braced structure, but look inside a dismantled Alumine Five and you’ll find strategically placed pads stuck to the cabinet walls. These three-layer, self-adhesive pads combine a heavy damping layer (adjacent to the cabinet wall itself) with added foam and impervious layers, allowing the low-volume pads to influence both the mechanical behavior of the cabinet itself and the enclosed volume. It’s an interesting solution because it manages to overcome the weakness so often audible in simple, braced aluminum cabinets (the all-too-recognizable resonant signature of the material itself) while maximizing the benefits (large volume and rigidity) by obviating the need to stuff the internal space full of wadding or long-haired wool. In fact, if the Stenheims were stood behind a sonically transparent curtain, you’d be hard-pressed to recognize the music as emanating from an aluminum cabinet at all. The absence of the bleached, grainy or lean colorations, the lack of sterile, mechanistic reproduction, is one big half of the Stenheim story, living, breathing proof that it’s not what you use but how you use it that counts.

The other half is down to the drive units, and after the cabinets, those come as quite a surprise, both the lineup and the chosen materials. In stark contrast to the use of the latest, precision CNC techniques, complex damping pads and finishing options, the Alumine Five's drivers are as traditional as they come, with a coated silk-dome tweeter and pulp or laminated paper midrange and bass drivers. The cone drivers use textile double-roll surrounds and massive magnets more normally found in pro-audio applications, and while Stenheim doesn’t build its own drivers, the company works closely with its chosen supplier (PHL, definitely not one of the usual suspects) to specify the electrical parameters, mechanical characteristics and precise details of the surface coating.

The use of such lightweight cone materials and large motors aids the system efficiency, while a hybrid second-order/Linkwitz-Riley crossover, the result of extended listening and evolution, ensures phase coherence and excellent out-of-band attenuation and makes for easy non-reactive load characteristics, despite the three-way topology. The other aspect of the driver lineup that might be considered slightly unusual is the use of a large-diameter (6 1/2") midrange unit -- although less so since Vandersteen’s patent on the approach lapsed some years ago, resulting in a rash of companies suddenly exploring the possibilities of the topology.

Perhaps more important, in the case of the Alumine Five, it means that you are getting the tweeter and midrange drivers from the Ultime Reference series speakers, teamed here with a pair of 10" woofers but without the benefit of a super tweeter. Even so, Stenheim quotes bandwidth out to 35kHz, which should suffice for most purposes. The review speakers arrived with the optional second set of terminals installed, allowing for biwiring or, more significantly, biamping, an upgrade opportunity that makes this an option you should take. If, in the meantime, you are single-wiring the speakers, make sure you factor in a set of jumpers that match your speaker cables: the Alumine Five's overall sense of musical coherence makes the benefits especially obvious. Likewise, good wiring practice is essential, both in terms of cable dressing and diagonal connection (red to midrange/treble, black to bass, with jumpers arranged accordingly).

Aside from the speaker's substantial weight, the parallel sides and flat surfaces of the four-square cabinet make setting up the Fives an absolute joy. Precise, repeatable, angular adjustments are easily achieved, while changes in attitude are just as straightforward, helped by the beautifully profiled stainless-steel spiked feet and deeply cupped footers. Both the cones and their locking rings have nice, large ports to take the supplied pry bars, but it’s worth greasing the threads before installation. One other thing to watch out for: the spikes are seriously (refreshingly) sharp -- sharp enough to penetrate a thick rug and score the floor below, so be careful where you stand the speakers once the feet are installed. Final positioning disposed the speakers on a broad front with minimal toe-in. When it came to dialing in their considerable musical energy, the most critical factor proved to be height off the ground, with tiny adjustments of the spikes making profound differences to the weight and pace of the presentation. Likewise, equal weighting of the four spikes was crucial to a proper sense of grounded weight and dynamic authority.
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Price: $60,000 per pair.
Warranty: Five years parts and labor.

(Source: The Audio Beat)

Nobody’s Fool　　( January 2011 )

Yoshitomo Nara

Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.

But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.

While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.

As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.

In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.

Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.

Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!

I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.

Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.

By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.

And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.

Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.

But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.

The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.

Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.

After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.

Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.

After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.

I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….