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Doug Schneider
All prices in euros or US dollars.
1 € is approximately $1.36 at time of report.
I'm spent. Show coverage SoundStage!
Network style is long, hard, grueling work. It means being up early in the morning to get
to the venue to shoot pictures and take notes, and then working late into the night
creating the report so that it can be online as quickly as possible.
It's important work to do. In order for
specialty audio and video to get exposure, publications like ours must provide the
coverage. Sadly, though, few do. I didn't see even one other North American-based
publication providing what could be considered in-depth coverage of High End 2007. Sure,
we saw a few relics wandering the halls, but I rarely saw a camera or notebook in their
hands. Perhaps they just don't want to do the hard work, or maybe they don't think the
subject is important enough. Or maybe they'll write a few words in a print magazine months
down the road.
But we do it on the spot, and we'll
continue to do it. It's one of the things that differentiates our publications. I don't
consider the SoundStage! Network to be Canadian or American or even North American. It's a
global group of publications read worldwide. So, without doubt, we'll be back at
High End in 2008, but before that we'll be at CEDIA Expo '07 and CES '08.
For now, though, it's time to sign off and
relax. The rest of the day won't be for show reporting but rather enjoying the sights of
Munich late on a Sunday afternoon.
***
There's something fundamentally ironic about the audiophile
world. On the one hand, you would think that all audiophiles would be seeking the
very best products and technologies they can afford. After all, isn't having the best
reproduction what being an audiophile is about? On the other hand, audiophiles ignore some
of the best technologies and products on the market because they're, well, too different.
One example is active speakers, and there's no better here
than the Aurum Integris Active 300B speaker system that we talked so much about in our Son
& Image show report. It's well known that the active-speaker approach (one where the
amplifier, speaker, and crossover are all combined into one package) can yield the best
possible results. That's because the designer(s), if skilled in all areas, can create
amplifiers and speakers that work perfectly together, something that doesn't
usually happen with traditional passive-loudspeaker approach. Active speaker systems are
staples in the pro-audio world, but for some reason they've never really caught on with
consumers, perhaps because active speakers take all the fun of mixing and matching
products out of the the owner's hands.
Another example where a much different approach can yield
superior results comes from Germany's Ballmann Electronica, once again showing the Behold
series of electronics in Munich. We first discovered this company at this show a few years
ago, and the products have never ceased to impress us.
What Ballmann is doing different from every other company
is creating a truly digital signal path, starting at the turntable (via an A/D converter
that fits atop a cartridge) or CD player (Ballmann offers what designer Ralf Ballmann
calls a "stupid transport" -- "stupid" because it does nothing but
read the disc). The signal stays in the digital domain until it hits the power amplifier,
where it's finally converted to analog. From what we've experienced, the results have been
astonishingly good.
One problem with the Behold system, though, is that it's
expensive. It'll cost you more than $40,000 to buy the power amplifier and control unit
with only minimal options. However, that's not the biggest problem -- many audiophiles
today spend more big money on conventional amp/preamp combinations. The problem is the
same one as with the Aurum system -- you have to buy a large chunk of your system as one
unit, taking all the mixing, matching, and tweaking out of the picture. No matter how good
the results might be, audiophiles just don't seem to like that.
However, Ballmann might be able to change that a
little with the Behold Gentle integrated amplifier. It
takes technologies from the statement-level products and puts them into a one-chassis
integrated amplifier that costs just € 8000. It's still not quite the
product for every audiophile on the planet, but it might help more become convinced of the
superiority of the "combined" approach that companies like Ballmann and Aurum
offer.
***
People used to talk about speakers having a British,
American or Canadian (speakers that end each song with "eh," perhaps?) sound,
and maybe at a time there was a shred of truth to it. Today, though, it doesn't exist.
Now, speaker sound falls into two categories: good and bad. Yes, it's as simple as that.
For example, when we listened to speakers from KEF (the
Muons) or Denon (the SC-CX303s), two speakers we praised so far in our Standout Demo
reports, or the Cabasse Baltic Evolution, a speaker we heard today in a room that might
earn Standout recognition -- the jury's still out -- there's nothing about their sound
that says they're from Britain, Japan, and France. They all sounded good -- very good --
with no need to ask where they're from.
***
On the last day of Festival Son & Image in Montreal I wrote, "We were a little disappointed with the
Festival...." In hindsight, that was an understatement. We were very
disappointed by the lack of new and interesting products on display. In fact, except for
CEDIA and CES, which are industry-only events, all the consumer-oriented shows in North
America seem like duds these days.
Time to wake up.
Munich's High End is something special. We just got back to
our hotel after the first day of coverage and I'm
exhausted. There were some amazing new products on display, all of which you'll
read about in our show report in the days to come, and some spectacular exhibits. KEF's
display featuring the € 100,000/$130,000 Muon speakers (below), for example, is
one of the best we've heard anywhere -- a rare case of bigger really being better. Without
a doubt, they'll earn Standout Demo recognition. Keep checking back for all the updates --
you don't want to miss any of this show!
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