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So this is now a story about the Sonus faber Lumina II, “Yulunga” and baseball? Well, let me put it this way-the Qlns may have gone yard with that whack of the drum, but the little Lumina IIs hit a stand-up double and scored a couple of RBIs. I suspected that yes, it’s possible that the Lumina might not even get on base. Once in a while, a little guy around the size of the Sonus faber Lumina II takes a swing at that big bass sound and misses completely. Some make it sound soft and bloated and without precise definition in space. Some, but still relatively few, give it the appropriate weight and clarity. That single drum beat, the first one up, the first one that signals that this entire album is such a gem of a recording-it can tell me almost everything about a speaker because it never ever sounds the exactly the same to me. But at least I’ll have a firm idea of their lower limits moving forward.
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This is where I’m going to trip up these little leather-clad boxes from Italy. What does this have to do with the very small and very affordable Sonus faber Lumina II monitors, the ones so small that they can’t even cover the top plate of the speaker stands I’m currently using? As soon as I swapped out the Qlns with the Luminas, I realized that I still had “Yulunga” cued up and ready to go. The sound of that enormous drum head being struck, yet still as softly as if Shirley Horn herself held the mallet, was just so perfectly round and possessed so much of the inner workings of such a precise collision.
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The Prestige One nailed it, perhaps better than any two-way I’ve heard save for truly expensive two-ways like the Vimberg Amea. There’s that part on “Yulunga,” a couple of minutes in, where the big bass drum/gong/whatever comes in, soft and deep and gentle, but still tremendously subterranean. It had been a while, and it was still as memorable as the first time I heard it. The Qlns are a fabulous monitor for a relatively affordable price of $6500/pair USD, and I recently spent an evening with these speakers listening to Into the Labyrinth. I’d been spending the previous weeks with the Qln Prestige One speakers, and one of the many things these Swedish loudspeakers do well, for a small two-way monitor, is deliver the goods on the bottom end. I had the Sonus faber Lumina II set up for failure. I still have people in the hi-fi industry remind me that the first time they heard this song was in one of my exhibit rooms. That old demo track from Dead Can Dance’s Into the Labyrinth has become a staple at high-end audio shows, and I take at least partial responsibility for that. It's like a Taurus SHO if the Taurus SHO is too well-known and common for your taste in old cars.The story of the Sonus faber Lumina II bookshelf speakers is also the story of “Yulunga,” perhaps my favorite reference track of all time. People may not remember many of the old cars GM was cranking out in the 1990s, but they will recognize the Lumina and they'll be pleasantly surprised when they hear what the Z34 engine and exhaust sounds like. But it exists now as a time capsule car, a trip back to GM's early-90s era of massive expansion and its vain attempts to reposition its brands and products to fight the Germans and the Japanese. It was never a barnstormer in its day, nor was FWD ever going to convince G-Body coupe and F-Body muscle car enthusiasts to give up their Grand Nationals, Cutlasses, Camaros, and Firebirds for a Lumina. The Lumina Z34 is one of those weird and interesting GM cars that most of us have likely forgotten about. Power's valuation has it listed at a "high retail" of only $1,825 USD, but whenever these do pop up it's likely that owners will try to get a little more than that out of them on account of the rarity and the growing desirability of obscure 1990s cars. The Canadian car was listed at $3,500 CAD and the Florida car at $1,100 USD, though it's hard to say if that's an accurate representation of what these things are actually worth.