Munich 2023

Quite the well-conceived display, don't you think? I have to say the same about the sound, one of whose high points, on Gabriel Rios's "Swing Low," was a wonderfully large and captivating soundstage.

Grimm's new MU2 music streamer/DAC/analog preamplifier ($18,000; below), which will start shipping in October or November, is already back-ordered. The unit boasts the company's FPGA-based discrete Major D/A converter, a relay-based analog volume control, AES, S/PDIF, and optical digital inputs, and XLR and RCA analog inputs. Outputs are analog XLR and RCA, along with a headphone output. "All sample rates are supported," says the literature. Ditto for Tidal and Qobuz. The MU2 also offers optional 2× and 4× upsampling, an internal SSD, and external USB and NAS storage. The FPGA interface board, power supply, and clock are manufactured in-house.

Grimm's choice of companion components was unusual, to say the least. Instead of using current-issue speakers of known provenance, they chose the same 35-year-old Pawel Ensemble speakers that they used to develop the MU2. (Everyone who keeps returning to the first high-end loudspeakers they ever bought will smile broadly.) The amplifiers were prototypes: class-AB 50Wpc babies with linear power supplies (release date TBD).