The Børresen 05 SSE is a two-and-a-half-way loudspeaker about 1.55 meters tall with a vented enclosure, whose three openings in order to ensure a noiseless air flow are each fitted with a metal diffuser, which is so characteristic for the appearance of the Danish loudspeakers. The upper end of the frequency band, as in all models of the 0-series, is in charge of the proprietarily manufactured planar ribbon tweeter - as known from the 01 - with an efficiency of 94 decibels, which can be used from about 2.5 kilohertz upwards and does without a transformer. The moving mass of the Børresen tweeter is said to be only 0.01 grams. As good as the ribbon tweeter may be, what lets the speakers in Børresen's 0-series set out of the crowd are the bass/midrange drivers with their patented, completely iron-free motors. Thanks to four opposing neodymium-52 ring magnets and rings of pure copper in between, or pure silver in the case of the Silver Supreme Edition, Michael Børresen was able to reduce the inductance of the voice coil to less than 0.04 millihenry - not even a tenth of the value of conventional drivers. This is intended to benefit the excursion speed of the driver as well as its ability to reproduce detail and to ensure that it is an extremely easy load for the amplifier to drive, with only minor impedance fluctuation and phase rotation.

The 05 uses two bass/midrange drivers with a cone diameter of 11.5 centimeters and four bass/midrange equivalents with a diameter of 15.5 centimeters. The diaphragms consist of two layers of very thin carbon on either side of a four-millimeter-thick Nomex honeycomb core and feature a very good stiffness-to-weight ratio. The pure silver rings of the six drivers together weigh about three kilograms. All Børresen speakers are conceived as two- or two-and-a-half-way designs. Michael Børresen has, of course, had experience with prototypes with more ways. But, only with the restriction to a maximum of two and a half ways he could - as he revealed in the interview - achieve the desired seamless and completely homogeneous performance. The serial crossover, thanks to which the electric current is supposed to be phase-locked over the crossover’s entire frequency range, certainly plays its role in this. Vacuum-impregnated coils are also being used in the 05. Here, however, the arrays of small, military-spec foil capacitors are biased. The speakers therefore come with the appropriate power supplies, but they are only the baseline to start from.

Weeks before the two huge flight cases with the 05 SSE speakers arrived in Gröbenzell, Morton Thyrrested, who, among other things, is the sales representative for the German-speaking countries, had put a PowerBox D-TC SUPREME and a Mainz D2 on their way: Ansuz' best external power supply, which provides the 14 volts needed by the 05, and the third best model in their row of current power cables. Also included were Speakz D-TC SUPREME speaker cables, as all the cables commonly used in my listening room are terminated with spades. Børresen speakers are basically fitted with jacks for banana plugs only, since the Danes consider these to be by far the best connection variant available. Of course, Morton Thyrrested, who also operates an 05 SSE at home and had raved to me about its capabilities especially in combination with the coupling elements from Zikonium, the Darks Z2S, had also thought of supplying two corresponding sets of feet. The fact that the "accessories" mentioned above push the price of the test objects distinctly upwards, should only be mentioned in passing...