LAST TANGO IN MUNICH, VIENNA CALLING!

It´s over and out for the High End at the Munich MOC. Since moving from the Frankfurt Kempinsky Hotel for the 2003 edition, the halls of the Munich event centre have been pretty much the centre of the audiophile universe every year in May, with only a short Covid-induced interruption.

Having first set foot at the High End for the 2013 edition, I can´t tell you much about the early years in Frankfurt. Twelve years ago, a lot of what we´ve known the show to be like in recent times, was already in place, the High End seemingly having effortlessly moved from being the premier German HiFi show to one of the foremost (if not the foremost) events when it comes to high quality music reproduction, worldwide.

Regulars at the show can pretty much find any of the big guns in the scene blindly: Transrotor in the front left corner of Atrium 3.1, Avantgarde in the big (and acoustically not too advantageous) room, fifth from the front on the left side at Atrium 4.1; Pro-Ject always has a massive stand in the front middle of Hall 3, and so forth. You won´t miss Audio Note (UK) at the show because you´ll know that they´ll be exhibiting at the Hifi Deluxe show at the Marriott hotel, a bit more downtown in Schwabing. When you know your way about the place, you notice pretty quickly who is missing, a notable absentee of the 2025 edition being Definitive Audio, Kevin and Lynn Scott having chosen to forego the last Munich affair in favour of the Audio Show DeLuxe, which took place on their home ground two months earlier. What also changed – the scale and price tags of the systems demonstrated; a seven-figure total retail price-worth of equipment quickly becoming the norm. This development has been going on for so long now that you become desensitised to it, still, it does make you wonder – who buys all this stuff?

Sometimes, however, the familiar takes place in an unexpected location. Silbatone Acoustics, known for bringing huge Western Electric horn systems from the early days of the talking movie from South Korea and having built quite a community around them, wasn´t in its usual spot somewhere in the back of Atrium 4.2, occupying an even larger space at a ground-level foyer. A massive double 22B system, sporting four 555 drivers per channel and a pair of TA 7395 bass horns, filled the room with equally huge sound, but Silbatone head MJ Chung wasn´t entirely happy. `So far, we´ve had fewer visitors than usual, even people who we´ve met here year after year have told us they haven´t been able to find us this time.” To miss this year´s presentation would be a crime, really, as this late model WE system from 1935, in fact one of the last ten according to Chung, took things to yet another level. What makes these nearly one-hundred-year-old speakers so special? The driver units have extremely strong field-coil motors moving very little mass. It´s like having a car with a big, powerful engine in a very light body. With modern ´high-end´ speakers, when you have big choral arrangement, you can make out maybe ten individual voices; here, you clearly hear a hundred of them. How does Chung feel about leaving Munich? “A little sad, maybe. We´ve made a lot of friends here. We´ll probably go to Vienna and hopefully meet some of the ´old´ friends along with new ones, anyway. I´d say the probability of us going to Vienna is 80%.”

Next to Silbatone was the talk of the town this year, the Acapella Hypersphere loudspeakers, measuring 2.7 metres (call it nine feet) high with hyperspherical horns of a whopping  1.7 metres in diameter. This is a two-way system, the horns being responsible for a whopping seven octaves of the frequency band! The bass is courtesy of eight horn-coupled 15-inch drivers a side, and the cost is rumoured to be 3 million euros for the speakers alone… Ampification was by way of Acapella´s own Energeia preamp and monoblock power amps combo. At about 250,000 euro for the set, they can be considered ´cost effective´ in relation to the price of the speakers, but all the same, I wouldn´t expect to get them thrown in as a freebie with the latter… We were among the first batch of listeners on Saturday morning (the halls opening at 10.00 am while the foyer was already filled with people), sadly the music to introduce these to the world was a bit of a spectacle and far removed from the surprisingly diverse and intimate set we heard from A Capella in 2024.

Karl-Heinz Fink of Fink Team didn´t seem to be too bothered by the impending move to Vienna, although he did create a Munich farewell edition of his Kim speakers, of which 21 pairs will be commissioned – one for each Munich High End edition and all strictly individual. “I was sad when we left Frankfurt, and of course this being the last time makes me reminisce some events and people of the past twenty-odd years, but life goes on and I´m sure we´ll see most of you next year in Vienna, anyway…”

One of a good number of manufacturers going ´all out´ for their last showing in Munich was Aries Cerat: the same huge room as last year, and again a set up that took so much space it was kind of impossible to get all of it into one shot. Starting from the speakers, Ariec Cerat presented the Pallas. This model sits one step below the flagship speaker Contendo – yes, really, there is a still bigger one! –  and is a four way semi-active horn speaker boasting 16 woofers for the bass duties, solid wood midbass , midrange and tweeter horns. Then, there was a turntable with a TWO KILOWATT motor and weighing four hundred kilograms on its own… Oh, and look at those very elaborately built acoustic wall panels, those must have cost a fortune to make and bring along but boy, do they look good.

Marten joins the biggest of big leagues, too, with its 950,000 euro Coltrane Supreme Extreme system consisting of the 140 kg main speakers and 270 kg bass colums. On static display only, though.

Chinese outfit ESD, specialising in horn systems with field coil drivers, was in danger of being a bit outgunned this year – after all, their flagship speaker systems costs less then 800,000 euros rather than seven figures… Still, their large-as-ever presentation at Atrium 4.1 was particularly colourful this year.

Special edition turntables have been ´a thing´ in Munich since last year´s edition at the latest – Pro-Ject being one of the most prolific peddlers of these, bringing an Elvis turntable, an AC/DC turntable and a Peanuts turntable this time around. Does a Metallica record sound worse on an AC/DC deck, and vice versa –  and does it matter, or are these getting bought by hardcore fans who wouldn´t play something else than their favourite band/artist, anyway?

You would think a Bluetooth speaker would suffice for on-the-go music (or if you´re a bait anal about  true stereo reproduction at one´s hotel room or camping site, two maybe), but here it is: a complete, albeit tiny, HiFi system in a flight case the size of a decent beauty case. Didn´t sound half bad either, albeit a definite verdict is perhaps better made after hearing this in a rather less noisy environment, the Pro-Ject stand (with Musical Fidelity, which was bought by the Austrian-based company some time ago, thrown in for good measure) always being one of the more densely populated ones in Hall 3.

A world premiere that was kind of hidden: The TechDAS Air Force IV. Word on the street is, that this one might be the sweet spot in the range.

A new product that is kind of important in its segment, and wasn´t even in one of the big demo rooms: Kondo/Audio Note Japan´s GE-2 phono stage, successor of the GE-1 which must be one of the foremost phono preamplifiers  in the lower five figure range. An MC step-up, of course, for which Kondo is especially famous, adds another seven- eight thousand euros, pounds, dollars or Swiss francs to the total.  

Alberich is a King of Dwarves (or Elfs) in German mythology and as such, a figure in Wagner´s Ring des Nibelungen – and also the name with which the forensic doctor Karl-Heinz Boerne in the massively popular German crime series Tatort Münster refers to his less-than-tall assistant Frau Haller. It´s also the name of a not very large loudspeaker (think LS 3/5A on a subwoofer column) from Berlin outfit Voxativ; single driver based, of course.

Business as usual at Atrium 4.1 E 124, where Avantgarde Acoustic resides for as long as I can remember. New this year were the Twin subwoofers, relatively discrete items – there were power conditioners larger than this elsewhere at the show – that allows one to accommodate Avantgarde Trios without them taking over the entire lounge… Plenty happening behind the scenes here, too – company founder Holger Fromme having sold his remaining half of the company to his long-term business partner Wolfgang Rixen at the end of last year, which made this not only the last High End in Munich but also the first one without him doing the presentations there.

Nah, don´t know who is fella is, or for that matter what he´s doing here, either….

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Eric van Spelde