From the Vault

It was back in the March 1996 issue of Hi-Fi News that I took my first look at the £6250 Stratosphere ST1 – a turntable that proved out of this world in sound quality as well as name. Now John Jeffries of Reference International (the name behind both the Strat and Lumley) has delivered a complete system including the £4500 LM2 loudspeakers.

With the front-end as before, namely the Stratosphere ST1 fitted with a Graham 1.5 tonearm and Transfiguration Temper cartridge, the preamp is now, surprisingly, a solid-state device though completely encased in shining chrome to match the look of the power amplifiers.

The latter are magnificent, both in size and power output, for the Lumley M250 monoblocks (£7500 per pair) are said to be capable, as the model number suggests, of 250W output in pentode mode and 130W in pseudo-triode mode.

Signature Towers
The Lumley LM2 loudspeakers are available in two versions – Reference and Signature – the latter featuring higher-rated crossover components and build quality, as tested here. In each speaker is a 200mm bass driver with rear-mounted 200mm ABR, two 75mm doped cloth dome midranges, two 25mm soft dome treble units with neodymium magnets and an excellent EMIT-type ribbon unit, found in a lot of top models. At first sight the multiple drive units make you anticipate a fuzzy, out-of-focus sound, but what a shock as you switch on. From all the visible radiating sources comes a sound typical of the convergence of a superb two-way speaker.

Roomy Tunes
The low-frequency enclosure proper stretches from behind the front bass unit back to the rear of the cabinet and then rises vertically to funnel into the crossover enclosure. At the rear is a passive radiator to which small weights are affixed. These can be used to tune the bass performance to suit room acoustics and taste. Similarly the crossover bass enclosure extension is ported with three holes, and bungs are used to tune the output of this too. Both measures make only small differences to the bass, but help in the room alignment of the bass characteristics.

Meanwhile, the crossover components are hardwired to a board suspended from the cabinet by low-frequency mountings that absorb vibration, making sure it is not transmitted to the coils and capacitors. These are generously rated, including some massive polypropylene ‘super caps’ and hand-wound air-cored coils to high precision, close tolerance values. All connections are made with silver stranded cable.

Similarly the speaker cable is Lumley Silver 14/4, silver-plated copper strands in a PTFE outer sheath with special dielectric fillers. Output to the speakers can be taken from a choice of gold- or rhodium-plated binding posts on the M250 power amps. The rhodium plating gives a slightly brighter sound that some might find preferable, though I was happiest with the gold in my, admittedly lively, room acoustics.

These amplifiers are physically very deep, nicely fitting on top of Target equipment tables, and have a heavily-chromed chassis on top of which are mounted a complement of eight 6550Cs in push-pull mode, a 5881 front-end regulator, two ECC82s – one voltage amp driving a cathode follower buffer amp – and one ECC83 input amplifier and cathode follower splitter. Between the rows of glowing glassware is a glossy black transformer housing with a plate at the rear disguising the power switches along with the valve bias adjustments.

Switch-on is a protracted, though straightforward, affair designed to extend valve life significantly. Two-stage switching is used; one switch applies power to the valve heaters for a recommended ten-minute warm-up period, while a second switch moves from standby to full operation. The reverse of this process applies when switching off, letting the valves cool gradually to even out mechanical stresses.

As for the PS2 preamplifier (£3550), a row of four chromed knobs handle, from the lefthand end, volume, balance, buffered input selection and direct input selection. The latter also includes mute and tape monitor. There are inputs for (moving-coi) Phono, CD, Tuner and Aux which are all buffered to the tape output, and the second switch adds two Direct inputs, one of which in practice is best used for hooking up a CD player.