SteinMusic Highline Bobby S Loudspeaker

The Highline Bobby S loudspeaker is the foundational building block of their loudspeaker system. It is a compact 2-way loudspeaker with a horn loaded tweeter.

The basic idea was to build a coherent and relaxed sounding horn loudspeaker with an excellent impulse response.For the high frequencies SteinMusic has chosen horns as they allow a perfect adaption of the diaphragm movement to the air.This significantly increases low level information, compared to a driver moving the air directly.The idea here was not to increase the efficiency by using compression drivers, which canresult in a somewhat thin and harsh sound.

Many years of development have been spent on the perfect matching between horns and drivers. An excellent frequency response, linear phase and perfect transient response are essential basics to create a good sounding speaker. The Bobby S meets these criterea easily.

There are currently three versions of the Bobby S:

The Original Bobby S

• Cabinet: Material MDF
• Cabinet: Finish Matte white or black lacquer
• Horn Finish: High gloss lacquer
• Horn driver: Carbon silk tweeter
• Bass: Carbon paper
• Crossover: Air coils and foil capacitors
• Wiring: SteinMusic Stateline solid core cotton wiring
• US retail price, pair: USD $8125

The Bobby S Signature

• Cabinet: Material MDF
• Cabinet: Finish Matte white or black lacquer
• Horn Finish: High gloss lacquer
• Horn driver: Carbon silk tweeter with maple resonator
• Bass: Carbon paper
• Crossover: Air coils and foil capacitors, excellent quality
• Wiring: SteinMusic Highline solid core cotton wiring
• US retail price, pair: USD $11,250

The Bobby S Ultimate

• Cabinet: Knife-veneered birch Ply
• Cabinet: Hand polishing with natural acoustic varnishes from our own production
• Horn Finish: natural acoustic lacquers
• Horn driver: Carbon silk tweeter with bronze rear chamber
• Bass: Carbon paper plus maple
• Crossover: Air coils and Film capacitors, Top quality from own production. Additional InLine Silver modules
• Wiring: SteinMusic Topline solid core cotton wiring
• US retail price, pair: USD $18,750

Drivers

The bass speaker is a 6" speaker with a carbon coated natural fiber cone, and extremely little mechanical losses. As a tweeter we use a horn loaded silk dome tweeter, which is also carbon coated. The diaphragms of the bass and the tweeter are also both treated with SteinMusic Maestro lacquer. This treatment gives both a very natural sonic signature, which is equal all over the entire frequency range that the Bobby S is able to reproduce. We source those drivers from one of the best manufacturers, and besides the cone treatments we further modify and optimize them in many aspects to reduce mechanical losses and get an open sound with lots of detail and no colorations.

THE BASS DRIVER

• Vented cast aluminum chassis for optimum strength and low compression
• Proprietary cone material with natural fibers
• Soft low damping rubber surround for transient response
• Non-conducting fiber glass voice coil former for minimum damping
• Extended copper sleeve on pole piece for low inductance and low distortion
• CCAW voice coil for reduced moving mass
• Long life silver lead wires
• Vented pole piece for reduced compression

The HF DRIVER

• Copper cap for reduced voice coil inductance and minimum phase shift
• Non-reflective rear chamber with optimized damping for improved dynamics
• Flow optimized vented pole piece for optimum coupling to rear chamber
• Fine weave soft fabric dome for smooth frequency response
• Saturation controlled motor system for low distortion
• CCAW voice coil for low moving mass
• Long life silver lead wires
• Low resonance frequency

Crossover

Before designing a crossover, the drivers have been carefully matched and adjusted so that we may get best results with the fewest crossover parts. This ensures no detail of the music is lost. Each component of the crossover was chosen after extensive listening tests. The most critical capacitor for the tweeter is an oil impregnated Mundorf foil capacitor. SteinMusic acquires these as raw windings and further processes it according to their ideas and experience to achieve a unique fine, expressive sound without coloration.
The coil in the bass section is made out of individually insulated stranded wire, and for resistors we only use our favorite parts made by Beyschlag. In addition to the classical components used in a crossover, we also use our proprietary made InLine Matrix components to get rid of magnetic distortions.

Enclosure

The housing is a vented box with short tubes in the front behind the high frequency horn. It is wider in the back than in the front in an exactly defined ratio that we empirically found out to be the best solution. One important aspect of this construction is that we will not have standing waves between the side walls. Another is that in combination with the 40mm thick back wall it gives the housings an enormous stability against unwanted housing resonances.
This allows us to work completely without any internal dampening material, which does not only absorb unwanted resonances but also always sucks out energy from the music. The Bobby S are equipped with solid walnut feet for a transparent but organic sound.

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Specifications

SPL: 88 dB

Impedanz: 4 Ohm

Frequency Range: 45 Hz - 24800 Hz

Crossover Frequency: 2400 Hz, 6/12 dB

Dimensions:

• Height :15.55 inches
• Width Front: 9.05 inches
• Width Rear: 11.02 inches
• Depth: 11.41 inches
• Weight: 29.7 pounds each