Jason Victor Serinus

Göbel didn't debut a new speaker at High End Munich. In a totally selfless world, I would have bypassed the room for another with something new. But I'm an audiophile, and audiophiles have needs. Not having heard a Göbel speaker for a long time, I strolled into the room for a listen.

Three years after finalizing the design of their HQS G 7001 monoblocks, brothers Arnaud and Laurent Fusilier of French company JMF Audio completed the design of the JMF Audio HQS G3 9001 amplifiers ($164,000/pair). Alongside other JMF Audio products, the 9001s debuted at the ancillary HiFi Deluxe show in the Munich Marriott, offering a similar sonic signature as their smaller cousins.

"Our new Octave Jubilee class-A mono amplifier has a slightly different sound than the Jubilee Mono SEs you reviewed three years ago," said Andreas Hofmann. Hoffman is the founder and chief engineer of Germany’s Octave Audio, and he was talking about his forthcoming push-pull monoblock, noting that the amp outputs 160W in class-A lower-power mode and 280W in class-AB high-power mode. The Octave Jubilee’s projected price is $85,000/pair without potential tariff hikes.

Over three years ago, when I reviewed Accustic Arts’s AMP V stereo power amplifier, I called it "the most intelligently designed hunk I’ve ever put my hands on, and one of the finest and most musically satisfying amplifiers to ever enter my system." I wish it were still here so I could reevaluate it with my current system, which has become exponentially more revealing.

You gotta love press releases. “This May in Munich, history won’t just be written—it will be heard.” Thus opened the invitation to a joint press conference of “two Norwegian powerhouses” whose system “doesn’t whisper innovation—it roars it.”

Gryphon's long-awaited pure class-A Antileon Revelation amplifier, the successor to the Antileon EVO, will hit dealer shelves late August in both stereo ($39,800) and mono ($45,500/each) versions. We used to say, “It will arrive late August if the creek don’t rise;” these days, we replace creek with tariffs.

A year without an MBL fix is a year incomplete. Hence, off to the spacious MBL suite I went, to experience a complete MBL Reference Line system ($750,000; price approximate, converted from Euros).