Michael Trei

It's hard to convey the scope of the annual High End Munich audio show to someone who has never attended. Spread out over three floors of a large facility called the Munich Order Center (MOC), the show is notable for how different it is from audio shows in the US. The ground floor is an area about the size of three American football fields, where brands set up professional trade show booths to display their wares. This is a long way from the draped folding tables and back curtain on a rail that defines a "show booth" at most US shows. What you'll find on this level is mostly static displays, although scattered among the displays you'll find prefabricated sound rooms, acoustically designed spaces designed to allow live demonstrations on the ground floor.

My main focus at the show was to try to root out interesting new record-playing gear. I was not disappointed. Here are a few select highlights from what I saw at the show.

The design was so energy efficient that a single degree of temperature change provided enough power for two days of operation; it would take an incredible 60 million Atmos clocks to equal the power demands of a single 15W light bulb. 95 years later, the Atmos Clock is still being manufactured in Switzerland by Jaeger-LeCoultre, but like most high-precision, Swiss-made instruments, it isn't cheap. Prices start around $7500.

The Compact Disc was launched in 1982, but the four decades since have seen an alphabet soup of similar-looking shiny discs including major formats like DVD, SACD, DVD-A, and Blu-ray Audio. As each new format arrived, hardware manufacturers scrambled to keep up, developing machines that could play just about any disc you could throw at them (or, rather, insert in them). The result was a bunch of "jack of all trades" disc spinners...

But what if we gave up the notion of universal compatibility and concentrated on building a player dedicated to squeezing the best possible results from the very first, and by far the most common, shiny 5" disc, the good old-fashioned "Red Book" Compact Disc? Would we get better performance?