Munich 2022

The Harman room at Munich High End showed a wide array of products on active and passive display. Several Classic JBL designs revamped with modern tech and materials took center stage in a long lineup display of speakers. The room's main active system included the large JBL Summit Everest DD67000 speakers.

DS Audio's Tetsuaki Aoyagi, known casually as Aki, was at High End Munich introducing his new DS Audio Eccentricity Detection Stabilizer ES-001 device. The next-gen (read: young) designer attended with his parents—something seldom seen at hi-fi shows. (That said, my father attended AXPONA again this year.) And families do attend the High End Munich show, perhaps more regularly than others.

Parisian high-end audio dealer AnaMighty Sound's room, F114 in Atrium 4, showed several products made in Switzerland from darTZeel, Stenheim, and Nagra. The room also became a mini-concert venue for a couple of demo sessions on Saturday that incorporated live music: Jazz saxophonist Jérôme Sabbagh played solo, accompanied by playback of his No Filter album bandmates on the room's system. They played 24-bit/96kHz versions of the tracks with Sabbagh's sax parts/tracks omitted.

There are no accidents, eh? A chance meeting with Wilson-Benesch's Luke Milnes, followed by several email and WhatsApp check-ins, led me to my final exhibit at Munich High End. There, in a system that also featured Audionet products, reigned the 308lb Wilson-Benesch Omnium loudspeaker ($169,000/pair), second in command in the company's reference Fibonacci Series. Containing three pairs of isobaric-loaded woofers, two additional bass drivers, one midrange unit, and the Fibonacci tweeter, this hardly diminutive loudspeaker utilizes new bio-composite technology that replaces the carbon-fiber Monique enclosure technology Wilson-Benesch pioneered in 1994.

CH Precision made a move equally smart and enlightening. Rather than devote endless minutes to introducing the new CH Precision C1.2 DAC/Controller, they harnessed many of their finest components together for a demo, which Jim Austin attended at a different time, in which Kevin Wolff compared the sound of various silver disc formats. Thanks to the wise music choices of Kevin Wolff and Roy Gregory, it was time well-spent.

One of my first stops at the Munich show was to find out who made the shiny red loudspeaker shown in an atrium room—shown in the same room as the latest gargantuan Gryphon Commander preamplifier and Apex amplifier. The striking speaker was rotating on a round platform that you couldn't miss when you entered the room. Why the rotation? It was an attractive speaker from all angles. It, uh, turns out, it was indeed a Gryphon—the EOS 2, a prototype, as text in large letters beneath clearly stated.