LATEST ADDITIONS

This was one of my favorite demos at the show. It sounded so well balanced, it seemed to deliver everything in the right proportions. Bold but not in-your-face; tonally ripe but not too warm; detailed but not stringent; effortless but weighty, and so on.

An ancient connection: Monitor Audio began in 1972 when John Bartlett, founder of the innovative retail chain Audio T, introduced me to Mike Beeny, manager of an Audio T branch near Cambridge, and Mo Iqbal, a local electronics wizard. Mike suggested that Mo and I join him to start a loudspeaker company. Monitor was a fashionable hi-fi term, and I suggested we name it Monitor Audio Ltd. Each director put £300 into the company account. It was registered as a PLC at an address in Teversham, Cambridgeshire. We rented an upper floor office in a warehouse close to Mo's home, since Mo worked all hours. There was additional workspace in his huge double garage. Mike directed sales, Mo was responsible for production management and accounts, and I took the position of technical director for research and development. I also helped supervise production. Lorna Parker was our office secretary.

After launching a handful of increasingly viable designs, we reached a then-astonishing turnover of £1 million in our first year and enjoyed a very successful showing at the Paris Festival du Son. But by this point, I was close to an overwork-related breakdown and reluctantly resigned.

To me, Burmester equipment is the audio equivalent of Porsche cars—sleek-looking, expensive, and designed for high performance. And as my visit to the Burmester room proved, Burmester gear is fun and exciting to listen to, which is what I assume driving a Porsche is like. (Maybe one day, I'll let you know for sure.)

The Marantz product that was under press embargo? A speaker! Actually, two speakers: the Marantz Horizon and its larger sibling, Marantz Grand Horizon. The speakers are intended for single-speaker wireless playback.

As I leisurely strolled through the lobby of Warsaw’s Radisson Blu Sobieski two mornings before the start of Audio Show 2024, it seemed impossible that, shortly after I awoke on October 24, truckloads of gear and audio show personnel would descend on the hotel. What now was a very quiet lobby and restaurant—I rarely rode the elevator with anyone else in it—would soon be packed with distributors, dealers, company heads, press, and visitors.

Before the beards, before the fuzzy spinning guitars, before the "Legs" video, there was an electric blues trio, that little ol' band from Texas, ZZ Top. In five years in the 1970s, they made their finest albums and found their first success. They came, they conquered, and gargantuan blues riffs—not to mention the concept of the power trio—were never the same.

Anthologized and reissued many times since their release—Tres Hombres alone has been reissued on vinyl three times just since 2006—the band's first five albums have been reissued again in an impressive, limited-edition boxed set from Rhino called From the Top: 1971–1976.

I saw a real live frilled lizard at the Audiofest! It was wide-spanning and awe-inspiring and finished in Santos Rosewood. And instead of spitting saliva, it projected music!