Cube Audio Nenuphar Single Driver Speaker (10 inch) TQWT Enclosure

No, I didn't listen to the BASiS; I'm not really a bass addict. In addition,I believe they are quite expensive (11,000 euros). Even the smaller stand alone subs are sold at Refined Audio for $5,500 -- which Jon admits is expensive.

- Robert

David, because Munich was cancelled I haven’t listened to the BASiS. Actually I’m more interested in the Magus for customers who can’t stretch to the Nenuphar’s.

Robert and Robert, thanks for your responses. 

If anyone owns / has had ears on the Nenuphar BASiS, please post.

RY: given the costs (and performance), that makes sense... as well as room sizes in the UK and Europe.

My move has been seriously postponed due to the current pandemic. Probably a year out now. It will be interesting what I end up with, listening room wise...and whether I will be able to try out the BASiS or an alternative future offering from Cube Audio.

@rwpollock Obviously it's *best* to just let the speaker designer make all the decisions for you, but there are a lot of subwoofer options out there that have all the basic features of the BASiS subs.  The full range driver is indeed "rocket science-ish", but looking at the subs makes me think there are plenty of other more cost effective solutions that might work just fine. 

The pandemic has hit almost all of us, so I'm also on long delay, but I'm still thinking about building the sealed box diy version of their monitors and pairing with my existing subs (the 2 x 12" bass units of Coincident PREs) and subwoofer amplifiers (Dayton audio SA1000 monoblocks). Won't look as pretty and may not sound quite as good, but it should be close at the worst.

It is generally recognized that overdamping the Nenuphars is not a good idea. At 6moons Srajan wrote in his review of the First Watt SIT-3 about driving the Nenuphars:
"...you won't be surprised to learn that the SIT-1 and SIT-3 were the perfect antidotes; better than the F5 and F7, very much better than the Pass Labs XA-30.8, radically superior to 200-watt class A/B specimens of the 1Mhz ultra-bandwidth persuasion."

As an example of the last, the Soulution 501 has a damping factor of 10,000 (which would correspond to an output impedance of 0.0001 ohms). The Mola Mola, a class D amp, has an output impedance of 0.003 while the Bryston 4B clocks in at 0.016 ohms. Still too low to be of interest.

Moving on to a couple of tube amps, the Audio Research VT80 has an output impedance of 0.12 while the Aesthetic Atlas is 0.25. With OTL amps, the LTA Z10 impedance is 1.2 ohms and their Ultralinear is at 1.6 ohms.

Looking at the solid state amps that Sjaran ranked we see a consistent pattern:
SIT-1  4 ohms
SIT-3  0.26 ohms
F-5  0.025 ohms
F-7  0.01 ohms
Pass XA 30.8  0.007 ohms

Here are the output impedances of the First Watt stable:
F-1  80 ohms
F-2  15 ohms
SIT-1  4 ohms
SIT-2  4 ohms
J-2  0.4 ohms
SIT-3  0.26 ohms
F-4  0.2 ohms
F-3  0.12 ohms
F-6  0.06 ohms
M-2  0.05 ohms
F-5  0.025 ohms
F-7  0.01 ohms

Which leads to the exit question: Has anyone listened to the F-1 or F-2 with the Nenuphars?

Robert