Over the fifteen years of its residency in Munich, the High End Show has become one of the major events on the home entertainment calendar. The unique design of the MOC exhibition centre, which combines open halls on its ground floor with separate rooms on the upper levels, makes it a space suited to accommodating every price level of audio equipment. It’s therefore become an indicator of trends and developments in the industry as a whole. There’s also something brilliantly surreal about the entire thing parts of the expo are a temple of chrome, more art exhibition than hi-fi show.
And hi-fi was very much the word. While last year multichannel audio made a strong impression, in 2018 the High-End show adopted a firmly two channel outlook there was a smattering of home cinema equipment, but the most significant releases were stereo in nature. What tickled our fancy? Read on…
DYNAUDIO
New Dynaudio speakers don’t happen terribly often, so the announcement of its new Confidence range garnered plenty of interest. Neither is this a mild makeover. While the speakers share some of the design principles of their predecessors, including the use of Magnesium Silicate Polymer (MSP) driver material, much is new, including a light-but-stiff baffle material, called Compex, and a newly minted tweeter waveguide, the DCC lens. Drivers have also been redesigned. The range extends from £11,000 for the Confidence 20 standmount to £35,000 for the top-line Confidence 60 three-way floorstander, and goes on sale later this year.
PMC
The Fact Fenestria is PMC’s new flagship loudspeaker, and as a result is a typically no-holdsbarred technological exercise that’s different in both design and appearance to any preceding model. Five years in development, the brand says it’s ‘the loudspeaker you’ll never hear,’ courtesy of a design process focused on removing cabinet-borne distortion and colouration. Working to achieve this goal is an aluminium assembly that isolates the tweeter and dome midrange from the rest of the driver activity; side sections to the cabinet that act like mass anchors in an earthquake-proof skyscraper; and an overall construction based on vibration analysis of every element of the speaker. Naturally, this 1.7m-high three-way model comes with a premium price £45,000 per pair.
FOCAL
Having updated its rangetopping Utopia system from the bottom up, Focal used Munich to show off the newest members of the family. The £90,000 Stella Utopia EM Evo and £160,000 Grande Utopia EM Evo represent the ultimate expression of the company’s design philosophy. Demonstrations of the latter, in conjunction with Naim Statement amplifi cation, showcased an accurate and effortless presentation with phenomenal bass, although the choice of music left a lot to be desired and we’d have loved Focal to have given the volume dial a good cranking.
TECHNICS/PANASONIC
Panasonic, thanks to the rebirth of the Technics brand, now has its fingers in plenty of AV pies. This meant that at Munich it was able to flaunt some of the only TVs on display, including its 2018 4K OLED range, while nearby the awesome Technics SL-1000R turntable strutted its stuff . Totally new, however, was the Technics OTTAVA S SC-C50, a wireless speaker that wants to be a cut above the norm. Featuring Bluetooth, Chromecast and Wi-Fi playback, plus optical digital audio, USB and 3.5mm inputs, it sports eye-catching two-tone casework and uses the company’s ‘Space Tune’ room calibration system to optimise its performance. Hi-res audio to 24-bit/384kHz is supported. No UK pricing yet.
CAMBRIDGE AUDIO
Cooked up to mark the company’s 50th birthday, Cambridge Audio’s Edge series was unleashed at the High-End Show in advance of a June release. These are the most sophisticated and costly components the company has ever designed, yet build upon ideas we’ve seen over the last few years, including combining network streaming and a pre-amp in the same chassis in the form of the £3,500 Edge NQ. This can be put to work with the £2,500 Edge W Class AB power amp, or you can use it as a conventional source with the £4,500 Edge A integrated amp. The demonstration system (pictured right) looked gorgeous and sounded sublime, but has us hankering for a multichannel iteration.
CHORD ELECTRONICS
The Choral Etude amplifier features what Chord Electronics bills as its first ‘fundamentally new topology’ in 30 years, resulting in a 150W-per channel stereo design claiming ‘unrivalled dynamics and effortless control’. Such a premium ethos explains the £3,900 ticket. Also unveiled at the MOC was the Hugo TT2 (£4,000), a hugely revised version of the original TT DAC/headphone amp released in 2015. Both products go on sale in the Autumn, and feature the audio brand’s trademark funky stylings.
METAXAS & SINS
The number of demonstration systems at Munich using reel-to-reel tape as a source has grown and grown (admittedly from a very low base). The good news for people who find vinyl just a little too cheap and practical is that you can now buy an all-new reel-to-reel machine, and quite the looker it is too. Made by Metaxas and Sins and called the GQT, it can be specifi ed as a playback-only device for €35,000, or with recording ability for something over €40,000. You’ll have to hurry, though, as the production will be strictly limited.
JBL SYNTHESIS
For something delightfully retro on a more modest budget (relatively speaking), perhaps the JBL L100 Classic will be of more interest. It’s built to the same basic three-way design as the company’s 1970s original (and includes the epically cool ‘Quadrex’ foam grilles available in vivid blue or orange), but crams in 40 years of technical innovation to create a speaker that is the perfect example of a retro-mod. The price will be around £4,000 per pair and the sound they produced at the show was utterly joyous.
ESD ACOUSTIC
Every year there are always a few products and demos at the High-End Show that leave us slackjawed in admiration, and one of these in 2018 was the ‘Dragon’ five-way horn speaker system from Californian upstart brand ESD Acoustic. A riot of exciting shapes many of which are constructed from decidedly expensive pieces of carbon fibre and pricey field coil drivers, as a complete system it costs ‘well over’ $1,000,000. At the High-End Show it could have done with a little more space to strut its stuff , but as a concept this got our attention.
This content is an extract from upscaleexistence
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