⌈ The HIGH END SHOW, held in Munich in May, is the largest event of its kind in Europe and the largest high-end show in the world. It welcomes more than 22,000 visitors over four days, more than half a thousand of whom are industry press, distributors and dealers from around the world, and features more than 800 brands - from the largest to one-man’s - in rooms and halls. ⌋

CELEBRATIN ITS 40th ANNIVERSARY LAST YEAR, the event is, in the unanimous opinion of exhibitors and visiting journalists, one of the most important ones in the audio calendar, and perhaps the most important. The Warsaw Audio Video Show is also highly regarded, but it is in Munich that the most important business decisions are made, and where the most contracts related to the sale and promotion of audio products are signed. That's where the money is, in a word.

▌ Numbers

AS THE ORGANIZER, the German company High End Society Service, reported, this year's show attracted a total of 22,198 visitors to the halls and rooms of MOC. The statistics were slightly higher than last year, with the share of industry-related people (11,237) being slightly higher for the first time than the number of audiophiles (at 10,373). Which would confirm what I'm talking about. High End 2024 hosted people from 108 countries; in addition to Germany, neighboring countries, Great Britain, Italy and the Netherlands were the most represented. In addition, 588 media representatives came to Munich.

⸜ Mr. Satoshi Yamamoto, head of sales at Final, in a doctor's outfit, as I am about to sit down in front of him while he performs a scan of my ears. Mr. Yamamoto and his team have an interesting theory about the correlation of headphone and speaker sound. A description of the whole procedure and the impact on sound - in a separate article coming soon.

The MOC area includes more than 30,000 square meters in four halls and three atriums. The organizer reports that, as in the previous year, spaces at the fair were bought up to the last meter by 513 exhibiting companies. Two additional events were held simultaneously with the HIGH END fair this year: IPS - International Parts + Supply, and World of Headphones in Hall 1. At the opening of the fair, nine global innovations were presented at the Heidelberg headphone.shop booth.

Stefan Dreischärf, managing director of the exhibitor after the event said:

High End Show was a success for everyone involved, proving that the industry is more dynamic than ever before. For international industry professionals, High End Show is a must-attend event that most people don't want to miss. What's more, audiophiles, music lovers and technology fans also appreciate the fair, because here they can enjoy the whole gamut of the audio world.

This year, too, several well-known artists took part in the event. For example, Steven Wilson, the HIGH END 2019 brand ambassador, in cooperation with speaker manufacturer PMC and organizer HIGH END SOCIETY Service GmbH, invited visitors to listen to music encoded in Dolby Atmos - demonstrations were held on all four days. The exhibitor's press materials read:

Undoubtedly, this was a memorable highlight of the trade show visit for many attendees. Wilson demonstrated surround sound and explained the difference between stereo, Dolby Surround and immersive sound, playing music of different musicians, genres and decades during the jam-packed sessions. A native of the UK, Wilson delighted the audience not only with his fantastic sound and spice-inducing moments, but also with the relaxed, friendly way in which he interacted with the audience.

▌ Diversity

So MUCH FOR THE STATISTICS AND OFFICIAL MATERIALS from the organizer. And how did it look from my perspective? First of all, the slogan of this year's event, which was Diversity in audio, was translated into reality but in a different way than the people of the High End Society would have liked. Their efforts to put perfectionist audio into a broader context are important and commendable. The better we are understood outside our information bubble, the better. The better impression we make on people who are not audiophiles, the better. And so on.

⸜ Dirk Sommer (hifistatement.net) and David Robinson (Positive Feedback)

Therefore, adding events other than audio to the event - this year there was a section with computer games - makes sense. Except that it doesn't necessarily make sense in this way. This year it was just a few booths with screens and consoles, and roaring speakers that drowned out everything around them. Maybe instead of putting the players in a common hall, it would have been better to prepare a completely separate room, for example, where Chinese horn speakers the size of a small apartment were presented this year? Separating this section would benefit all parties.

The other face of "diversity" we're looked for this year was the face of Steven Wilson presenting immersive recordings, that is, presented in Dolby Atmos. I wrote about it in the introduction to this issue, so I'll only briefly repeat what I mean: it's a fantastic experience, but also not very in line with what audiophiles do every day. Surround music has been promoted by publishers since the 1970s, because every time there has been an attempt to resuscitate it, from quadraphonic to 5.1 from DVD-A and SACD to modern Dolby systems, it has been about additional revenue for publishers, not about real new quality.

This time it's a bit different, as technology has finally given manufacturers the tools to make this a high end sound. So much so that putting a dozen speakers in a room where we listen to music seems a pointless endeavor. In my opinion, it is better to take care of two channels, because the return on such an investment will be higher than with an immersive system. Of course, you don't have to agree with me, but I have seen so many similar initiatives, and which have been imposed top-down, by manufacturers, publishers, recording studios, etc., that spotting a familiar pattern in the latest initiative is not at all difficult.

⸜ Pianist and vocalist Anne Bosson is also an audiophile, hence her frequent presence at the High End show. This year she was promoting her latest album Be My Lover.

"Diversity" in the case of this year's show was about something else: about absolutely equating all available trends in audio. There were tapes, LPs, CDs and SACDs, and even cassette tapes. There were planar, dynamic, horn, open-baffle and hi-tech speakers. Tube and solid-state amplifiers, class A, AB and D. And, of course - headphones. All of this worked together in harmony, with no attempt to suggest that any of it was out of place. It was as if everyone had finally come to terms with the fact that we have a variety of options, and within each of them satisfactory results can be achieved.

▌ Trends

AMONG THE THINGS THAT CAUGHTS MY ATTENTION was the ubiquity of tape players, and on the other hand the strong emphasis of manufacturers and exhibitors on CDs. I haven't seen so many new players accompanied by refreshed or simply older designs restored to the lineups in a long time. The return of the Compact Disc wasn’t a surprise for me, I just didn't know when this "surge" would occur - it seems that we are just now witnessing it. Manufacturers I talked to about it emphasized the ease of use of the format, the availability of music and the low cost of used discs. Well, that will probably change soon, but we can still shop for pennies.

File playback technology has finally matured enough so that we can talk about some stability, at a really high level. Manufacturers such as Innuos, Lumin, XACT, Sforzato, Aurender, Taiko, Auralic, Cambridge Audio, Simaudio Moon, Naim and MBS have streaming platforms that guarantee very high sound quality. This goes hand in hand with improved operation in many cases, which Roon also helps with. All this adds up to a stabilizing effect. It's really hard to come up with something groundbreaking at the moment. So manufacturers are focusing on improving what they already have in hand.

⸜ Gabi Van Der Kleij-Rynveld with her, so far, most expensive cable from limited series Infinity.

The world of loudspeakers has also, for a long time now, been stagnant. Slowly but steadily, however, transducers are being improved, and designers are getting better at interpreting measurements and translating them into a good-sounding product. When it comes to speaker types, stabilization is also evident. Every year, more manufacturers are going for dr Heil’s designs (Air Motion Transformer - AMT), but just as many are using classic dome or horn drivers. Diamond is the most desirable material, not only when it comes to treble reproduction, as is neodymium, which reigns no longer only in tweeters. If I had to point out something puzzling, however, it's gigantomania - many projects are so large that it takes several people to even move them.

Against this background, a little more is happening in the world of amplifiers. But it's not about the ritualistic juxtaposition of tubes and transistors, but about power supply. In this area, steady progress has been seen for several years after manufacturers reached a "wall" with their products and had to find a way to break through this blockage. It turned out that the way to do this is to expand and improve the power supply. A thing, seemingly obvious, and yet based on calculations from years ago. Calculations, it seems, that were wrong.

Things are different now, because we have come to better understand the dynamic and variable nature of the music signal. That is, we know that the power supply must be much more powerful than static measurements would indicate. What's more, we also understand the need to eliminate noise from the entire bandwidth, even down to a few MHz, because it also affects the base-band. By the way, you can see the industry opening up the bandwidth, so to speak. An increasing number of designers are designing amplifiers with a bandwidth of up to several hundred kHz in mind, rather than up to 20.

⸜ This time there was only one car at the Show, but what a car that was - Lamborghini. With it in mind Technics prepared a special version of its turntable.

And in all this switching mode power supplies have found their place. I know, I know - the classic linear power supply is great. However, more and more often, including at the Munich show, I hear devices based on the so-called SMPS that play extremely well: Ferrum, Chord Electronics, Lumin, Aavik, Linn, Soulution and others. So it seems that we will see more and more solutions of this type, especially since the European Union has ambitious intentions regarding climate neutrality and does not look at the sensibility or otherwise of the regulations in question.

What didn't I see? Well - the industry pretends that there’s been no such thing as an AI revolution, and that ChatGPT does not exist. And yet, in just a short while it and programs of this type will change our industry as well. In doing so, I am not talking about journalism, but the way devices are designed. Is it so hard to imagine that AI will assist the design process, based on what it has "learned" from audio magazines? Perhaps it will more efficiently associate test results with specific technical solutions and measurements? This is the future, and yet already today the impact of artificial intelligence should be noticeable in the audio file industry. Playback devices are even designed to cooperate with them, for example, in the field of control. I didn't notice anything like that in Munich.

▌ „High Fidelity”

THE THING I DID notice, which was not directly related to audio products, was the fatigue I saw in the eyes of many exhibitors. In a word, people are getting a bit fed up with the constant pursuit of "good sound" at events like this, because it's a lottery. This time, it seems to me, everyone did slightly "let go". And that’s good, and hallelujah! And it’s a good thing, because we need a breather. Less tension and more fun. And hallelujah, because we need more slack and less bloat.

⸜ Participants at the Statement in High Fidelity awards event: yours truly, Dirk Sommer, German distributor of Keces, the Liao brothers of the company, Enrico Rossi and Alberto Baroni.

That's why it's such a pleasure for me to have Statement in High Fidelity awards day, and then feast with the awardees. Let me remind you that we are talking about an international award, given jointly by the two magazines → HIFISTATEMENT.net and "High Fidelity". The awards are given twice a year, in the German edition during the High End Show in Munich and in the Polish edition during the Audio Video Show in Warsaw. Each time we select only two products together. The heads of the awarded companies are invited by us to dinner.

This time we honored products from Taiwan and Italy: the Keces K4 preamplifier and the Norma Audio REVO CDP-2 Compact Disc player. The meeting in a small Bavarian provincial restaurant was attended by the brothers who run Keces, with its CEO, RONALD (KANG YU) LIAO, and Norma Audio was represented by ENRICO ROSSI, its owner and chief designer, and ALBERTO BARONI, its head of sales and PR.

Interestingly, the Taiwanese company is based on a manufacturer of toroidal transformers, which their father, Mr. Liao, manufactures. Doesn't that remind you of something? And Fezz Audio? - After all, it's an exact transformation of the same story, only that twelve years later - Keces Audio was founded in 2002, and Fezz Audio in 2014. And just as today the Polish company manufactures toroidal transformers for many audio companies from around the world, the Taiwanese have specialized in it; more on this evening → HERE ˻PL˺.

As I said, this year the exhibitors seemed to be tired and slightly "off". But still, I found rooms I really liked - both in terms of sound and ideas for new products. We marked some of them with special stickers marking the 20th anniversary of our magazine, and now I would like to mention five places that I especially appreciated.

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˻ A ˺ like AUDIO GROUP DENMARK

The Danish company offers complete systems, from signal sources to amplifiers and cabling to speakers. This time they presented the new Børresen T5 floor-standing loudspeakers, much cheaper than similar-looking designs at the top of its range. What's more, they played very well indeed. The system also included an Aavik SD-880 file player and I-880 amplifier, Ansuz 3rd generation cables and network (internet) products, also by Ansuz. All of these are part of Audio Group Denmark.

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˻ C ˺ & ˻ E ˺ like CANOR & EPOS

A system based on Canor electronics and Epos speakers; their designer, Karl-Heinz Fink of FinkTeam, uses them in the design process. This Czech company is increasingly bold in pushing its way into the global high-end stage, but it has strong arguments in hand - for example, the facilities in the form of a factory where Pro-Ject products are made, but also a talented designer. In turn, the Epos brand was bought by Heinz, which showed in Munich several new models with its logo. The sources of signal in this case were the Luphonic R3 turntable and the Aurender file transport.

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˻ G ˺ like GAIT

It was a complete surprise, as the system was tiny, and sounded really good. It was based on speakers from the Taiwanese company Glass Acoustic Innovations (GAIT) with diaphragms made of glass. The company developed its process to achieve a smooth and uniform structure and resistance to damage. A simple association with "glassy" sound comes to mind, of course. In this case, however, it is as far from the truth as the fact that there is no such thing as a climate warming. The Taiwanese at GAIT really know how to do it. In addition, they used relatively inexpensive Keces electronics, and yet - it sounded great.

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˻ H ˺ like HARBETH

Harbeth is associated with classic loudspeakers, so the NLE -1 (New Listening Experience) active loudspeakers shown at the show may have come as a surprise. But they were conceived as a concrete aid for people involved in music production. One button allows you to change the sound of a speaker, allowing engineers to hear what it would sound like on, say, an iPhone 12. Powerful sound from small speakers. The system also featured Manley Labs equipment, including the new Manley Oasis phono preamplifier.

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˻ I ˺ like INNUOS

Oh, what a sound it was... Innuos file transports on display feature new streaming platforms, which translated into a deepening of the sound and making it quite saturated. Although I didn't have much time, I sat for a while encouraged by the smoothness of this sound. Also important in the system were Nagra's DAC, Gryphon's preamplifier and power amplifier, and Kroma Atelier speakers and Stromtank power supply.

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▌ And finally

THINKING about AUDIO, I see redundancy. And seeing it I think about ecology. It came to my mind when I saw all those speakers, amplifiers, cables, etc. that are needed to reproduce immersive surround sound. It's not only the cost in production, but also in use and then disposal.

The scale of my hypocrisy, however, quickly brought me back to reality. After all, audio by its very definition is environmentally unfriendly. The amount of power that must be expended to convert an electrical signal into acoustic motion is incredible, and the losses are enormous. A little better is the case with horn speakers, but these are usually driven by tube amplifiers, which are heat generators. The ideal would be class-D amplifiers with switching power supplies and speakers with ultra-high efficiency. But even these would be half-measures. The ideal solution would be to switch to in-ear headphones - in this case, the power required to drive them is a maximum of 1 W.

However, the stress of realizing the environment non-friendly my way of life was quickly drained out of me when I remembered something Katarzyna Boni recently reminded me in her article Together or not at all („Książki. Magazyn do czytania”, 02/2024, pp. 62-65). Well, 80% of the carbon footprint on planet Earth is generated by 57 companies! And many of them, with BP in the lead, shames their customers, thus shifting the odium of killing the Earth right to them.

The truth is that many environmentally friendly activities, whether electric cars, wind farms or even photovoltaic, are related to losses of another type, but ones we do not see, and because lithium is mined far away from us, and because we have not seen neodymium with our eyes, cement production is morally "transparent" to us, and cleared forests for energy storage, for example in Sweden, as passionately written about by Fredrik Kulberg in his book War with Beauty. Reportage on the disfigurement of Sweden, somehow we care little about, because we don't hear when a tree falls (Dowody na Istnienie. Wydawnictwo, Warszawa 2022). Let's not let ourselves be told that it's solely our personal fault because we sort our trash poorly and put the milk packaging in the paper bin. Let's do what is right, but let's also not forget that someone tricked us into it.

Therefore, let's already make a note in our calendars: the next HIGH END SHOW will take place from May 15 to 18, 2025. Before that, however, we will have an exhibition in Warsaw, I would like already invite you for. As usual, we will prepare meetings with music, with Dirk and Birgit Sommer we will listen to records with you, and I will be happy to shake your hands, thanking you for supporting us during the 20 years of our magazine. See you there! ●