Munich High End 2017 – Loudspeakers over €15k

I’m not making excuses for the sound at the Munich High-End show. It was uniformly awful, with a few exceptions. This actually works in our favour because we can concentrate on products of interest rather than ones that happened to sound good. Here is a short list of some of the finest:

Most promising new products/New Brands

Finkteam WM-4

Shown in early prototype form in the Marantz room, the wide, €65,000 WM-4 designed by Karl-Heinz Fink and his team sported BMR midrange units and 380mm paper cone bass drivers to deliver a tight, rhythmic, and yet deep presentation when played through Octave amplification and an Ideon Audio Ayzaki DAC. The performance was reminiscent of classic ‘pace, rhythm, and timing’ designs like the Naim DBL and the Linn Isobarik, so perhaps it was no surprise you could almost feel waves of air pressure from all the nodding heads and tapping feet.

Focal Scala and Maestro Utopia III Evo

Two main models in Focal’s high-end Utopia range – the €32,000 Scala and €50,000 Maestro – have been refined and updated this year. Both will sport Focal’s new Tuned Mass Damper suspension system, claimed to deliver greater linearity and lower distortion in the 1kHz-4kHz region, and the company’s Neutral Inductance Circuit, designed to lower harmonic and intermodulation distortion across the frequency range. The redesigned crossovers in both speakers are housed in their own internal chamber and bi-wiring is back, this time designed for bi-amping use. There are also three new finishes, including this excellent metallic blue finish. There are presently no plans to incorporate the Evo upgrades to other models in the Utopia range.

Magico S3 Mk II

First shown – but not demonstrated – at CES, the $28,000 per pair Magico S3 Mk II was being played for the first time to European audiences through a predominantly Spectral system. The S3 Mk II is a true trickle-down design, featuring the diamond-coated beryllium-diaphragm tweeter, and the graphene carbon midrange and bass drivers are derived from the units developed for the M-Project, which are filtering through the whole M-Series product line. The all-aluminium curved enclosure draws from developments in the line too, with a revised outrigger base, convex top plate, and chambered sub-enclosures for mid and top. The sealed box loudspeaker pulled in big crowds, in part because it was one of the least-compromised sounding rooms delivering surprisingly deep bass from a relatively small loudspeaker.

Art Deco Acoustics Sound + Design

Coming out of nowhere, Art Deco Acoustics trio of products are designed to work together as a system. The system is formed of the M15 two-way passive loudspeaker, which rolls off at 125Hz. As a consequence, it is designed to work with the huge B16 bass loudspeaker, which delivers the goods down to around 28Hz in room. The E17 integrated amplifier, a matching ultralinear, no feedback design sporting a pair of KT150s at the show to deliver 40W per channel, completes the system. The company chose to demonstrate in one of the exhibition hall booths, so proper evaluation was impossible, but the c€135,000 system showed some promise!

Stenheim Ultime

Stenheim’s new €184.5k Ultime, is a large, exceptionally heavy CNC milled aluminium floorstanding enclosure, featuring a four-way, eight-driver D’Appolito driver array. It uses an impressive four 32cm woofers, and two 17cm midranges, as well as a neodymium tweeter and a ribbon supertweeter. Driven by a combination of Kuzma and Wadax front-ends, VTL electronics and Fono Acustica cables, this was one of the rare systems that managed to transcend the limitations of the room, delivering excellent stereo imaging and great detail.

Best Presentation/Sound

Avantgarde

Avantgarde’s show at Munich is always something of an event, as it gives the company the chance to show off its Trio loudspeakers with a three-tall stack of Basshorns, all driven by its XA amplification. This year, this became an occasional PA rig for a drummer that I missed, but as I walked in the company was playing Rammstein at ear-levels. Of note this year, the Trio frame is now available in ‘shiny’. Not chrome-plated aluminium: solid bars of steel polished to a mirror finish. This adds about a quarter again to the already substantial weight and price of the Trio!

Estelon

I’m not sure how to categorise the new Lynx from Estelon. The €50,000 towers are fully active, include built-in DACs and wireless connectivity to be driven by a range of sources from phones on up, and they feature the motorised main baffle designed to align the speaker with the room (as seen on the company’s flagship loudspeaker, the Extreme). Estelon itself calls this the first in a range of Intelligent Speakers, a true plug and play device. And that was how the demonstration played out. This was an impressive idea, with an impressive execution, and an impressive demonstration, too.

Living Voice

Unless you count the new waxed bronze details and the European walnut veneer, there was nothing intrinsically new about the Living Voice Vox Palladian horn/Vox Palladian Basso bass horn demonstration, but once again it was the quality of the presentation that kept people enrapt. It was a hot glass box full of people listening to music, in a place where there were a lot of hot glass boxes part-full of people listening to a collection of sounds. Consistency of presentation is difficult to achieve, especially from year to year but the combination of Origine source, Kondo amplification, and Living Voice horn loudspeakers seems to achieve it. I’d love to say effortlessly, but I think that the effort involved is reason they achieve such consistency.

Joseph Audio

To my mind, the best sound of the show came from a system comprising open-reel tape and streaming into Alluxity amplification into a pair of Joseph Audio Pearl 3. Jeff Joseph had a pre-release, off the desk version of the latest Sgt. Pepper reissue on hard drive, and Dean Martin on UltraTape. Forget ‘all else was gaslight’. All else was drab!

Kharma

I’m calling this out not because of the quality of the sound, the €200k Enigma Veyron EV-4D loudspeakers or the rest of the system used, but just for the sheer effort involved in dressing a room with such professionalism. I’m not sure large framed power cords or grass on the walls is my idea of top-line décor, but absolutely full marks for giving it 100%!

“Mentioned in Dispatches”

Alongside its new turntable, Burmester showed its upcoming BC350, a somewhat less extreme version of the winged behemoth shown last year. Price is still to be determined (but it will be six figures) and will likely be launched in 2018. ELAC also showed a late prototype of the Concenrto M, a €30,000 slimmed down version of its flagship. Others worthy of note include the TIDAL La Assoluta, Raidho’s D-5.1 tower, and the Wilson Benesch Resolution played through Ypsilon electronics. I’m sure there were others, but I have to say I didn’t hear much that got past ‘mediocre’ and one or two that could strip paint at 100 paces.