There I sat, utterly fascinated and astonished by the effortless, open, lively, and highly musical performance, and I had to admit to myself that neither tube amplifiers nor highefficiency loudspeakers were at work here. In a way, I was reminded of the character of my venerable and beloved Dynaudio Contour 1.3 MkII (also a Dane), which I owned three decades ago, only what I was hearing now was on an entirely different level. One thing was clear: these loudspeakers had to be reviewed!

A year and a half later, here it is in my listening room, the Frida, priced at €15,750 per pair. Keep in mind: For a two-way compact loudspeaker! That is no small sum, even though hefty stands are included, pushing the total weight of the large wooden shipping crate to nearly 100 kilograms. Did I mention that such test candidates are particularly popular among hi-fi editors? In any case, the stands are an integral part of the Frida, positioning the small enclosures at ear level and giving them such a stable foundation that the symbiosis effectively creates a slim floor-standing loudspeaker.

Finish and craftmanship are flawless, as one would expect at this price point. The cabinet walls are built in five layers with a thickness of 26 millimeters and carry a CNC-milled front panel made from aerospace-grade aluminum. The characteristic pattern and distinctive shaping of this plate are designed to optimize reflection behavior. It houses the pair-matched drivers: the tweeter is a 38-millimeter ring radiator with remarkable resolution that, despite its size, is claimed to extend up to 38 kilohertz. For the comparatively small mid/bass driver, roughly 13 centimeters in diameter, Storgaard & Vestskov use a mineral fiber diaphragm with high internal damping and a naturally linear frequency response that requires minimal correction. The crossover hands over between tweeter and mid/bass at 2,750 hertz with a relatively gentle slope of 12 decibels per octave, employing a Linkwitz-Riley filter. While the specified lower cutoff frequency of 32 hertz strikes me as somewhat ambitious for such a compact loudspeaker, my listening impressions confirmed that the Frida indeed reached impressively into the deep.