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Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

This weekend’s Munich High-End show was, once again, a hugely successful event. More than 800 exhibitors across three halls, two atriums and dozens of rooms make this the most important event on the current audio calendar, and it’s also become the place where businesses speak to one another, and where a lot of truly international deals are done. It has all but replaced CES in these respects.

No one person can visit all these rooms, and any show report is doomed to omit more than it finds. So, while we are still ploughing through the press kits, brochures and hundreds upon hundreds of photos and business cards, here’s a quick guide to what we thought were the best in show. Naturally, this is always going to be little more than a personal snapshot through what is good (anything marked ‘best’ may as well read ‘my best’), but there were some highs, and some low, that were outstanding:

Best Sound (that didn’t cost a fortune)

PMC had a surprisingly simple demonstration; just dark curtains, some posters, a (mostly) hidden system, and a pair of the new PMC Twenty.26 that were first seen at the Bristol Sound & Vision Show in February. The PMC team were playing all kinds of music (always a good sign), were friendly and light-hearted, and the loudspeakers were making good, unpretentious sounds.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Maybe it’s a UK thing, but the combination of new KEF Reference loudspeakers and new Arcam pre/power amplifier combination was also sounding extremely good; ‘affordable’ is a relative term, but in show where excess is the norm, this combination was the right side of €20,000.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Best sound (that did cost a fortune)

Generally, my take on the matter is a simple one: if it quacks like a duck, and isn’t a duck, it’s a horn loudspeaker. Not a fan. However, two of the best sounding systems I heard from the cost-no-object end of things at Munich were paradoxically both horns. If you could get in (and weren’t subject to one of the 45-minute silent demonstrations because the bass from the room was swamping its neighbours) Magico’s Ultimate III lived up to the name in every respect. Standing pro-basketball player tall, weighing a healthy 363kg per side (excluding subwoofers), this $600,000 loudspeaker had a combination of big-horn effortless, and the typical Magico tight, deep bass.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

The other big hitter was the Living Voice Vox Olympian, a £340,000 exercise in high-grade steampunk-fi with a sound that meant the room was constantly filled to bursting. For good reason; it sounded sensational, especially with the vast Vox Elysian matching subs on the end of some top-notch Kondo amplification.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Other ‘mentioned in dispatches’ fine sounding systems included the €390,000/pair Marten Coltrane Supreme 2 loudspeakers driven by DarTZeel amplification, and the new MartinLogan Neolith loudspeakers. These new flagship designs were still in the final stages of tweaking, and the models presented were allegedly not run in, but they sounded outstanding fresh out of the box. Price is to be decided, but they didn’t look cheap!

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Best Sounding ‘trickle down’ product

Constellation Audio is living up to the trickle down. The brand’s cost-no-object Reference range helped create its Performance range, and now the concepts that went into these models are going into the Inspiration range, which takes prices even lower. The new $9,000 Preamp 1.0 and $20,000/pr Mono 1.0 power amplifiers were playing through Wilson Alexias and retained the Performance sound so well, few noticed the change when moving between the two lines.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

 

Best looking room

This might not be the kind of thing that is in any way important to many audiophiles, but if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. McIntosh was in the Fine Sounds Group room, but it also had its own 1950s Americana themed room, complete with Fender guitars on the walls, a jukebox, and this designer distressed hog. Where most brands relied on curtains and posters, McIntosh stands alone here.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Most bling product launch

This must go to Fine Sounds for the hour-long trawl through the latest products with Livio Cucuzza, the group industrial designer. The new Audio Research G (for Galileo) range showed us just how cool and shiny the three new models are, with videos and discussion, but completely forgetting things like the power rating of the amplifier. Still, it all looked very slick.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Most innovative new product

This is a hard nut to crack. The plethora of new products significantly slowed down show reporters; a new loudspeaker is a five minute conversation, but talk about a streamer and you can spend 25 minutes trading acronyms. Nevertheless, several products stand out.

BMC announced a new Pure Media media server that integrates with Pure DAC and Pure Amp. This had the kind of on-screen interface that anyone could use in seconds, but was expected to cost around £3,000.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Electrocompaniet launched its EC Living concept, designed to show Sonos users precisely what they are missing, but is scalable enough to be used with the company’s top electronics. In other news, Electrocompaniet launched its first turntable, and a more up-scale phono stage.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

Finally, the new MiZiK system (featured in the current Hi-Fi+ issue), played through Wilson-Benesch Square Fives was showing people just how much performance can be extracted from both a digital and an analogue source. In the city of Munich, Wilson-Benesch also announced its innovative new Endeavour standmount, powered by the excellent ch-precision solid-state electronics.

, Munich High-End 2014 – The Edited Highlights

There’s more to come, including two new players from Astel & Kern, Simaudio Moon’s 430HA headphone amp and native DSD DAC, Crystal’s striking new Minissimo standmount, and much, much more…

Tags: FEATURED

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