Talking of upwards: When the two flight cases arrived, their appearance made me expect anything but good to happen. Because of the six large carrier rollers under each case, it was impossible to manoeuvre them into the elevator, which would have made transporting them from the ground floor to the second floor much easier. The last resort was to hire a moving company to get the two cases to the third floor. Freed from their packaging, the 05, weighing 75 kilograms each, were then quite easy to move, as I experienced when they had to vacate their space for a couple of weeks during the testing of the enormously high-efficient and euphonious sounding Soundspace System Robin.

For the first setup of the 05 SSE in my listening room, the two main shareholders of Upper Level ApS, under whose umbrella Aavik Acoustics, Ansuz Acoustics and Børresen Acoustics join forces, Lars Christensen and Michael Børresen, made their way to Gröbenzell. I made them of course aware of the floor markings for the approved set-up positions, but then I rather took care of making fresh tea. When I returned, I was amazed when noticing the listening room to appear much larger with the rather tall 05 SSE than before with the not insignificantly more delicate looking Goebel Epoque Aeon Fine. The solution to the riddle was that the two had simply ignored the markings. Although the baffles of the 05s roughly came to match the same stereo basis line, which had proven to be ideal in my listening room over the years, the Børresens were now unusually close to the side walls of the room. At the back, the distance between the wall and the side of the speaker was just 25 centimeters, while at the front it was almost 43 centimeters. As a result, the transducers were strongly angled inwards aiming at the right and left shoulder of an imaginary person sitting on the listening chair. Visually, this was convincing straight away. The view of the back wall of the room was virtually unobstructed by the speakers: The study appeared airy and open.

The first tones, however, did not win me over for this setup variant. For me, the performance lacked of too much bass and the necessary accuracy in imaging - but that didn't worry Lars Christensen and Michael Børresen in the least: The previously burnt-in speakers would rather need an hour to acclimatize after transport, and besides that, the speaker cables had not yet been able to accumulate a single hour of operation either. So we treated the cables and the speakers to an hour of music and ourselves to Bavarian sausages, sweet mustard and pretzels. After that, the system already sounded much more pleasant – oh no, the author isn't a fan of wheat beer at noon. When the two Danes then added eight Darks Z2S feet to their speakers, the lows forfeited none of their energy, but gained extremely in definition. However, the most impressive thing about the 05 SSEs and their unusual placement was the size - and depth - of the imaginary soundstage. I never lived up to such a great acoustic encounter of the cinematic kind in my listening room before.