Introducing the Vimberg Mino

For those of you who don’t know yet, Vimberg is the sub brand of Tidal Audio in Koln Germany, available exclusively at Lotus Hifi here in the UK. Vimberg is the result of Tidal CEO Jorn Janczak’s vision to offer a Tidal-like zero compromise product with Tidal sound and credentials but for half or a third of the price and hence to a much wider audience.

If you’ve not been keeping up with the worldwide audio shows the past year or so then take a quick glance at some of my links below. When the Vimbergs were first played to the public at Munich Highend last year, people stood around aghast that the price was for both loudspeakers rather than one ! Since then reviewers like Jeff Fritz have gone on to buy a pair and in print have likened their performance to something significantly higher than other Highend speakers which are sold at more than double the price and to be fair, the high praise and generous kind words have never really abated. These speakers have been availble to buy for just a few months but have already garnered a flock of industry awards.

Here then, we focus on the entry floorstander, the £23,000 Mino with ceramic tweeter. For the purposes of this article I don’t wish to get too in depth with the the technical or even sonic attributes of the product but rather, give you a really general overview of what we are dealing with and what you can expect.

Take a look at other speakers at this sort of money and it’s pretty obvious that you are getting an awful lot for your hard earnt in terms of actual physical stuff. A fully ‘Tidal lacquered’ cabinet 1.28 metres high, three 168mm woofers , a 90mm midrange unit and a 30mm ceramic tweeter. The sheer beauty and weight of these things gives a very strong impression of a very high level of build both inside and out. Then when you go on to consider the actual quality of components before you, the Accuton drivers, the very best Mundorf and Dueland crossover components, Argento binding posts etc. you maybe start to wonder why or even how the Mino can be manufactured and sold at this sort of level with all parties making a worthwhile profit. Well let’s just say that Vimberg might be somewhat akin to the Sony Playstation console or the Nissan GTR of Hifi. The customer is getting an awful lot for his money, the manufacturer maybe precious little. This is good news for you though of course and also a bit of a spanner in the works as far as the marketplace is concerned.

The Mino basically sounds exactly how you always wanted a speaker to sound or always imagined the best of the best would sound. It is first and foremost perfectly neutral and linear, so much so that speakers you perhaps thought were neutral adding little or no character of their own might not seem that way anymore. The sound is extremely open with not a single hint of a cabinet or box or even a particular driver being part of the music making process and also this openess is quite clearly achieved without any trickery of pushing the midrange forward, “aerating” the upper frequencies or indeed “skeletalising” the lower frequencies.

No part of the frequency spectrum is pinched, or stuck out or recessed or manipulated; this is simply the most natural and unforced sound. Unflustered, uber calm and completely see through the music seeps from the Mino into every square millimetre of the room. The overall tonality is full and weighty, tilting slightly to the darker side and an ever so slightly rounder smoother presentation. It seems to have a kind of luxuriant bathing effect on you, tonally delectable and just extremely pleasurable to listen to. Further listening reveals a transducer that has very profound levels of musical expression. It is capable of convenying the smallest shifts and progressions in weight, volume, texture and harmony but with such subtelty and without ever calling attention to that tweeter. So the musical connection, the emotional intensity in the room, is strong. Like, you will be grinning … or crying !

The presentation of the music is also holographic with superb imaging (maybe even more three dimensional than a Tidal speaker) and the bass is tight, tuneful and full of texture and resolve. The Mino’s have a very generous amout of weight and scale and they just fill the room gloriously. They have speed and precision aplenty and a massive macrodynamic range so whilst Josephine Cronholm’s agonsingly beautiful voice will have you raining tears into your ipad, Mahler’s 9th will ramp your pulse up above 150 bpm in your chair.

It’s difficult to imagine needing more sheer grunt and size than the Mino but those of us lucky enough to have really large rooms, a rarity now in the UK, might opt for the bigger Tonda model. Note though that the Tonda just gives you a bigger sound and a little more dynamic envelope. The actual sheer quality on offer here, the level of detail and transparency, are already operating at the highest possible level as far as loudspeaker design is concerned. No, you do not have to buy Vimberg’s most expensive speaker to do full justice to the resolution and dynamics of your amps and front end. With the Mino we are already starting at an extremely high level of outright performance, indeed higher degrees of resolution and neutrality than many manufacturers achieve anywhere within their entire loudspeaker range if truth be told. That being said, the diamond tweeter option is probably a must tick box if you have a really good system and a spare £7000 and for me, cherishing clarity, fine detail and expression, a Mino-D would be prefreable over a ceramic Tonda.

Aside all the hifi ‘isms’, everyone who hears the Vimbergs is always left primarly with a feeling of absolute effortlessness and naturalness. This just does not sound like hifi. There are absolutely no sonic pyrotechnics at work here, no analytical dissection, no over separation, no sparkling or biting at the top end, no extra delineation of basslines and rhythms and as a result, no sterility, dryness, glare or starkness. This is the proverbial disappearing act, the sound you have always been searching for.

The other thing jumping at me from my own notes is that the Mino just seems to sound incredible no matter what the system. I have had Vitus integrateds, the little 75 watt Allnic valve Integrated and Tidal’s best electronics driving these things and they only every sounded utterly captivating and engaging and that’s also regardless of the music choice and recording quality as well. I don’t even understand why or how this is but the Vimbergs just seem to engage no matter what and you just can’t stop listening to them. If you could somehow wire a Roberts radio up to them I reckon they’d still sound great !

After all of that then, it’s actually hard to believe that a Tidal speaker operates at an even higher level than this, giving you extra degrees of clarity and crystalline purity that I’ve personally not encountered anywhere else. But the Tidal speaker is arguably more relevant when one has a full Tidal system that can reciprocally match it for absolute levels of neutrality and clarity. We have successfully placed many Tidal speakers with Vitus customers too but for many the Vimberg might be the preferred choice with a much bigger product for the money and a slightly more tolerant one at that.

Please let me know if there are any questions or you would like to pop by for  a listen.