SHOW REPORT
The High End Show in Munich is now the show you just have to attend, whether you’re a manufacturer, a distributor, an audio journalist or an audiophile. Jason Kennedy was blown away by the gear on show at this year’s event…
The High End show in Munich is beginning to dominate the audio calendar, its scale and the ability to attract visitors from across the globe mean it is the place to be if you want to make a mark in the hi-fi business today. The sheer quantity of excessive kit can be snow blinding, and there are all those people in the industry to talk to, but if you take your time it’s possible to find new com
ponents that really do push the state of the art rather than the art of marketing. Here are some of the more interesting new products I found at Bavaria’s finest audio jamboree.
Aries Cerat builds price-no-object valve electronics and horn loudspeakers in Cyprus and sees no need for restraint when it comes to quantities of chassis. The single-ended Achilleas Legend Series power amplifiers consist of six cases with 813 valves driving an 813 output stage, the 300kg per channel weight is nearly as hefty as the €250,000 price. The brand launched the Helene DAC with eight R2R ladder converters and a single ended valve output at an almost affordable €12,800, and in just one box.
Wharfedale and Mission designer Peter Comeau had been very busy finalising three new ranges to finish for this show. Wharfedale has two new flagship models in the Elysian 2 and 4; these have AMT planar tweeters designed in the US and mid and bass drivers that were designed in collaboration with Scanspeak. Both models have slot ports and wide baffles for ‘free and easy energy flow and good dynamics’. The Elysian 2 (£5,000) standmount was making some nice noises on the end of Audiolab electronics and a Lumin streamer, the Elysian 4 (£7,500) was happy just to hear its 93dBSPL sensitivity and 22Hz bass extension discussed.
Evo4 is a step up from the Diamond range and combines an AMT tweeter with dome midrange in the bigger models. It was nice to see the revived Wharfedale Linton on dem, this classic has apparently proved very popular and it’s not hard to see why.
Also under Comeau’s command are the Mission ZX models, these have a ring radiator tweeter and comprise two standmounts (ZX-1, ZX-2), three floorstanders (ZX-3, ZX-4, ZX-5) and a centre-channel speaker (ZX-C1); no prices have been announced as yet.
Wilson Benesch founder Craig Milnes is a proud father! The substantial GMT One turntable and arm system isn’t finished but it’s getting there. This is a very ambitious record player both physically and technically. The GMT One uses a field coil drive system with a large ring of transformers surrounding a subplatter that’s wider than the acrylic platter with graphene and polymer centre that you see (three alternative platters will be provided in the final product). The turntable is pneumatically suspended with isolation down to a claimed 1.7Hz and the tonearm is a unipivot design that’s part of a set of alternative arms of varying mass to suit different cartridges. There’s storage for the alternate arms and cartridges in the stand and these can be swapped in to suit different records. As yet no price has been set but it will definitely be of the ‘if you have to ask’ variety. Wilson Benesch says that it plans to have a full launch in December.
Designer Touraj Moghaddam describes Vertere’s latest record player, the DG-1, as a ‘plug and play’ device because you can buy it with a cartridge and all it takes to set up is to get the counterweight in the right place. Vertere has come up with a cunning arm bearing based on nylon threads for both vertical and horizontal movement. The idea is to avoid stiction, the resistance that sliding bearings have to changing direction, and given that a stylus has to do this all the time that would seem sensible. The arm itself is a flat, onepiece sandwich construction with damping; it has two counterweights to suit a wide range of cartridges as well as the one that will be optionally supplied. The most important part of a turntable in Vertere’s opinion is the motor; on the DG-1 this is matched to its drive system during construction rather than having adjustability built in to keep costs down. Price will be £2,750 or £2,850 including MM cartridge.
Audio Solutions from Lithuania showed the most ambitious speaker it has built to date. The Virtuoso has a cabinet within a cabinet for maximum stiffness, three crossover settings to suit different rooms and tastes, and a wideband midrange driver that covers more octaves than most. It starts at 500Hz above a pair of 190mm paper bass drivers and hands over to the large 30mm tweeter at 7kHz. Which means that all the important detail is covered by one driver which should help coherence but I suspect that it may stretch the high-frequency capabilities of a 165mm diameter driver. It sounded good in the booth though… as you might hope for €23,000 per pair.
Focal is 40 years young and celebrated in typically French style with the Symphonie 40, a case containing both Stellia (closed back) and Utopia (open back) headphones, a Focal Arche DAC/amp for the home and a Questyle QPM portable player. This limited edition creation costs €15,000 and will look great in the boudoir. Those after speakers can choose from the retro-style Spectral 40th floorstanders with beryllium tweeter at €8,000 and a very limited version of the Scala Utopia (€70,000) with a special black silver finish, of which four pairs are to be made. For a marginally wider audience Focal also introduced light and dark wood veneer finishes to the Sopra (oak) and Utopia (walnut) ranges for those not so keen on shiny paintwork.
British brand Falcon relaunched with a BBC LS3/5a a few years back but designer Graham Bridge is also keen on pushing the tech envelope. The HP80 (£12,500) from the new V series is a floorstander with a grapheme-impregnated Twaron aramid fibre cone in a 165mm diameter chassis that Falcon developed in-house. It’s combined with a 28mm soft dome tweeter and has grab handles on the rear to give it a tougher look. It sounded good with a wall of BAT electronics that Graham was very keen to turn up to 11.
The sheer quantity of kit can be snow blinding but if you take your time it’s possible to find new components that really do push the state of the art rather than the art of marketing
Chord Electronics has used the dual feed-forward error correction topology and ultra high-speed switching power supply tech developed for its range-topping Ultima power amplifier in two new Ultima monoblocs. The Ultima 3 is a 480-watt design with Chord’s usual options on side panels for £11,000 per channel, while the Ultima 2 ups the power to 750-watts and the weight to 86kg for an £18,360 asking price.
Chord isn’t just about digital sources, it has produced a new phono stage called Huei (apparently the traditional spelling has already been taken by a helicopter company!). This is microprocessor controlled and comes in a compact ‘Qutest-style’ case. It offers variable loading, a rumble filter and the round switches indicate status with different colours. It’s yours for £990.
Michi is an aspirational sub-brand that Rotel created in the nineties, and at an offshow site a new range of Michi was being used with Bowers & Wilkins 800D D3 speakers in a room that was created for looks rather than sound. The new Michi amplifiers have OLED displays including power meters on the mono and stereo power amps. The P5 preamplifier has digital and analogue inputs plus Bluetooth and will sell for between $US3,500 and $US4,000. The S5 stereo power amplifier is specified with an output of 500-watts per channel for $US6,500 and the M8 monobloc claims 800-watts for $US6,500 per channel. So lots of bang for big bucks.
PMC took the opportunity to show what Dolby Atmos is capable of if you pull out all the stops and play some Miles. The company set up 19.2 channels including Wafers for the height channels and three of the big Fenestria floorstanders at the front and played brand new, unreleased Atmos mixes of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain that sounded extraordinary to say the least. The engineers that had made these mixes explained how they set up Atmos mics in a live room and played the original three-channel mix through stereo speakers pointed at a glass wall and captured the reflected sound on multiple mics. PMC brought over Miles Davis’ son Erin and his drummer Vince Wilburn to enthuse about the results, they did a good job but it can’t have been hard.
Melco’s Alan Ainslie has a bee in his bonnet about metadata. Alan is a classical music lover and has never been happy about the way that most network servers deal with metadata for music that doesn’t follow the standard artist/album/track protocol.
PMC took the opportunity to show what Dolby Atmos is capable of if you pull out all the stops and play some Miles
The next firmware update for all Melco music servers will include SongKong software that uses multiple resources for metadata and can be customised to suit different requirements and theoretically tidy up any music library from the front panel of a Melco. They are also changing the server software from Twonky to MinimServer, which is also savvy to the differing requirements of classical and can sort by work, orchestra and composer among other variations. The more obvious news is that all of Melco’s servers are now available in black.
Kondo (Audio Note Japan) specialises in valve electronics that in the case of power amps have always had exposed valves, the new Melius power amplifier is bucking that trend with a more conventional enclosed case. It has a solid-state power supply with an EL34 push-pull output stage and an output of 32-watts per channel; it also uses a new generation of Kondo capacitors said to be very close to the best they make. Price will be in the region of $38,000. Kondo also showed the M7 Heritage which is a variation on one of its best-loved preamplifiers but with a bigger power supply and onboard phono stage. It has two phono inputs and both balanced and SE inputs, but no price at the time of writing.
Engineer Todd Eichenbaum was on hand to say something about the Mark Levinson No.5101 SACD player/streamer launched at High End 2019. All four digit Mark Levinson components are entry-level by their standards and the No.5101 is therefore the most affordable digital source in the range at $US5,500. It’s fully featured with wired/wireless streaming using the Arcam Music Live control app (they’re in the same group), digital inputs and a suspended slot-loading disc drive. There are also two new integrated amplifiers in the line, the 5802 ($US7,000) has only digital inputs but is a Class-A/B design with 125-watts of power,
an XMOS USB input and MQA capability. The 5805 ($US8,500) is the same amplifier with the addition of analogue inputs.
Audio-Technica has revived a classic cartridge in its moving-coil range. The new AT-OC9X series starts with entry-level models featuring aluminium cantilevers and elliptical styluses (AT-OC9XEB - £210, AT-OC9XEN - £300) and moves up to the Microline (AT-OC9XML -£480), Shibata (ATOC9XSH - £570) and Special Line (AT-OC9XSL - £660) models with boron cantilevers and permendur yolks. All AT-OC9X cartridges have dual moving-coil structures.
Californian digital specialist MSB used to make distinctive if reputedly rather hot-running, cylindrical power amps. The new M500 is a bit more conventional if still pretty serious. Available in mono or stereo form with modular internal build it offers a million microfarads (or one farad) of power filtering and 134dB dynamic range behind a claimed 500-watt output. Build is to the usual extremely high standard found with MSB, but
then you’d hope so with prices at $US58,500 for the stereo and $US118,500 for a pair of mono M500s.
Simaudio’s latest power amplifier, the Moon by Simaudio 860A V2 (£16,750), replaces three models in the range and is bettered only by the megabuck 888 in the Moon by Simaudio range. The 860A V2 incorporates tech that’s designed to ensure even operating temperature for both high and low level output transistors irrespective of output requirements. Fully balanced, it’s rated to delivers 225-watts per channel in stereo form or 750-watts when bridged to mono, and a pair worked a treat with Dynaudio Confidence 50 speakers.
Technics has launched its first network streamer. The Technics SL-G700 is also an SACD/CD player with a metal disc drive, multiroom capability with Chromecast, balanced and SE out with volume control and MQA compatibility.
Never one to hold back on features, Technics is also providing a multi-input DAC, wired or wireless networking, app control, Bluetooth aptX and headphone out for €2,499.
Tech Das unveiled what might just be the most expensive turntable in the world ever at $US450,000. The Air Force Zero has an air bearing motor, a five part 100kg platter made of different alloys atop an air bearing, and three air pumps/power supplies. It was demonstrated with CH Precision electronics, Vivid Giya One Spirit loudspeakers and as
CAD pointed out, a CAD GC-1 ground control noise absorber which proves that almost anything benefits from a clean ground.
PMC has made a small but significant upgrade to its elegant fact loudspeaker series which has now been cut down to two models and dubbed Signature. Both fact.8 and fact.12 models have new crossovers that are said to benefit from tech developed for the big Fenestria model and upgraded components including Clarity capacitors and Mundorf resistors. I had hoped to see Laminair loading on this range but was told that this would require a ground-up redesign. Prices for flat white or metallic grey only finishes are £6,995 for fact.8 and £14,995 for fact.12.
Existing fact. owners are not being offered the option to upgrade.
Auralic has added another hewn from solid black box to its G2 range in the Sirius upsampler. This is designed to enhance the performance of any DAC by upsampling to a sample rate that hits the ‘sweet spot’ of the particular converter being used. It can output signals at up to 384kHz and DSD512 and convert PCM to DSD or vice versa for £5,499.
Tech Das unveiled what might just be the most expensive turntable in the world ever, the Air Force Zero, with an air bearing and a 100kg platter: $US450,000.