Herb Reichert

I quit smoking before cigarettes hit $5/pack. I sold my last car, a nickel green 1977 Mercedes 300D, for $500. But I have sold a lot of six-figure audio amplifiers, and clearly, the juicy audio good stuff—the super-exotic—blows everybody’s mind. 1893 Chateau Lafite Rothschild gear is out of the reach of the lumpen proletariat. But so what? It is still cool and spectacularly wild and a blast to listen to, which anyone can do at an audio show. Take the all-out Aries Cerat system Joshua Masongsong of Believe High Fidelity was showing at Munich 2019. Have you ever heard anything like this?

The South Korean company Silbatone manufactures exquisite pure tube and hybrid audio amplification that's specifically engineered to be un-conventional, un-compromised, and un-affordable. About that last characteristic: It's un-affordable because it's not for sale—and everyone knows you have to pay extra for stuff that's not for sale. Right?

I'm sitting in the Alluxity room next to Joseph Audio's Jeff Joseph and wondering how his new graphene-cone Perspective2 loudspeakers ($14,999/pair) can sound so big and solid and transparent when they're so far apart. I'm looking for the hole in the middle, or at least a fuzzy-creamy center, but I can't find it. All I can "see" are the solid, accurately described voices of singers like Ella and Elvis.

Leute, High End München 2019 ist der große Audio-Zirkus . . .

I keep getting older. By the time you read this, I will be genuinely old. When I was genuinely young, I bellyached, "Wires are the worst part of hi-fi—there's gotta be a way to get rid of them." I first made that statement when audio electronics and loudspeakers both still nestled inconspicuously in proper bookcases. Back then, people sitting on the sofa weren't forced to stare at diverse audio boxes and ungainly wires.

Jolida Audio began life a fabricator of vacuum tubes. But since the early 1990s, it has been known for its musical-sounding, modestly priced tube amplification. Jolida was also famous for its association with Jim Fosgate, famous for his Dolby Pro Logic inventions and, more important (to me at least), his battery-powered cartridge-azimuth alignment tool, the Fozgometer. Which I use all the time.

My personal selection for Stereophile's 2018 Product of the Year was the super-resolving, highly-involving TAD Micro Evolution One loudspeaker ($12,495/pair). I heard it first at a MoFi demonstration at an audio show. Wherein I repeated the words "wow" and "my god" over and over. Think goosebumps and awe. But I never thought, or imagined, how much more fleshed out and expansive the ME1s could sound with another octave of energy at the bottom. This year, in the second Tenacious Audio room, the $27,995/pair TAD Evolution E1TX-K loudspeakers produced a much larger and more forceful energy field—with an enhanced octave to octave tonal balance. The E1TX-K's dual 7" woofers and CST coaxial mid-tweeter array delivered an extremely beguiling transparency.