Jim Austin

I wandered in to the room shared by, among other companies, Accustic Arts and Fischer & Fischer. The news from this room is two new high-value products—by which I mean that they're cheaper than the company's main lines, so there's a good probability that they offer good value. High-end companies trickling down appears to be a Munich High End trend—note, for instance, the Mark Levinson No.5101 SACD player/streaming DAC I wrote about earlier today.

From my first room at High End Munich: Some actual news: A new SACD player from Mark Levinson.

Both the name of the company and the look of their products belie what I found to be the company's spirit. "CAD"—short, in this case, for Computer Audio Design, but more commonly denoting computer-aided design, evokes highly technical, inhuman stuff. The main CAD products on active display in this room at AXPONA—the CAD Audio Transport, the 1543 Mk II DAC, and various "Ground Control" boxes—are squared off and minimalist in design, resembling space objects from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The components' green logos evoked, for me, nothing so much as the eyes of aliens come to abduct us.

If you're after an elegant classic look and a compact form factor, you'd be hard-pressed to do much better than the Luxman NeoClassic series, including the SQ-N150 integrated amplifier ($2795) and the D-N150 CD player ($2595). Both are new, and both are now shipping.