Art Dudley

A few years ago, the Hotel Bonaventure (formerly the Hilton Bonaventure), long the site of the Montreal Audio Fest (formerly Salon Son et Image), turned its sprawling restaurant into a sprawling ballroom called the Ville-Marie salon. For the 2019 Montreal Audio Fest, that room was home to Focal Naim Canada (formerly the distributor known in Canada as Plurison, and in the US as Audio Plus Services.) Daniel Jacques (on the left, with me, in the photo above), who founded Plurison/Audio Plus in 1983, has now sold that company to Vervent Audio Group, which owns Focal and Naim; those brands, including a few others—namely IsoAcoustics, Cambridge Audio, Musical Fidelity, Siltech, Vicoustic, and Solid Tech—will now be handled in Canada by Focal Naim Canada, and, with the exception of Cambridge, in the US by Focal Naim America, also a Vervent subsidiary.

Everything you've heard is true. Lufthansa really is among the world's finest airlines. (I say that as an uncomfortable and often unwilling traveler who has had nothing but perfect flights on Lufthansa), Munich is one of the cleanest, most attractive, and most easily traveled cities in Europe. And Munich High End is, without a doubt and by a stunning margin, the greatest audio show on Earth, period. Nothing I could say—nothing—can prepare you for the sheer scale of the venue, the number and variety of exhibits, the quality of those exhibits, and the exciting, carnival-like vibe of Munich High End: It must be experienced.

Anyone who knows me will be happy to tell you: I'm very bad at letting go of anger. I hold grudges. I'm unforgiving.

Perhaps you've heard this before, but it bears repeating: Veteran exhibitors and attendees alike have a great deal of loyalty and affection for this seven-year-old show and its busy founder, Gary Gill. I was reminded of that during my very first stop on day one of Capital AudioFest 2017, when Kevin Hayes of VAC described the reasoning behind the decision to assemble such a large, expensive, and distinctly ambitious playback system: "In light of the move to this time of year, we wanted to help Gary and the show by doing something exceptional." The result: a system built around the mighty Von Schweikert Audio Ultra 11 loudspeaker ($295,000/pair), powered by two pairs of VAC's Statement 450 iQ monoblock power amplifiers ($120,000/pair).