High End 2023 pt4 The Thorens Reference wins our largest turntable of High End 2023 award. Priced at €220.000 including arms it has to be one of the most expensive too. The arms are a 12inch version of the classic TP 160 alongside a rebadged Thiele TA01 which attempts to combine the benefits of a […]
High End always comes good with extreme gear and 2023 was no exception. The Marco Serri Design Gladiator above was actually at the off site show Hi-Fi Deluxe and weighs in at 250kg per channel. It has 420mm bass drivers, external crossover, open baffle mid and tweeter and comes from Modena. I didn’t dare ask […]
The Wand gets thicker Simon Brown makes the Wand tonearms and turntable in New Zealand, for High End 2023 he brought along the new Dark-Light arm (c.£5-7,000) which is a very distinctive design with a tapered carbon fibre beam with a massive 40mm diameter at the counterweight end. A nominal 10 inch design it has […]
High End show, Munich 2023 The madness of High End 2023 never disappoints. This year Germany’s busiest audio event brought forth a shedload of fabulous new gear, what follows is just the gear that caught our eye to begin with. There will be a lot more lovely equipment from Europe’s ultimate high end show. PMC […]
Audio Show Deluxe, Whittlebury The first Audio Show Deluxe took place on March 25th and 26th at Whittlebury Hall, home of several other shows in the past. It’s not the most exotic of locations unless you are into motor racing, the roar of vehicles on the nearby Silverstone track could be heard from the car […]
Oslo Hi-Fi Show 2023 pt.2 Aavik, Ansuz and Børresen get us dancing Filling larger show rooms with good quality sound can be even more of a challenge than mastering the acoustics of the smaller bedrooms. But the best syndicate room by far, to my mind, was that of Audio Group Denmark. With a system costing […]
Oslo Hi-Fi Show 2023 pt.1 When a country needs a decent audio show there’s probably nobody better equipped to create it than the major importers working together with the top magazine. So it is that Oslo now has an audiophile show to be proud of although one city centre retailer did their best to scupper […]
The Bristol Hi-Fi Show 2023 pt.2 PMC Distribution took the opportunity to demonstrate the new Martin Logan Motion series of loudspeakers. These have a black folded motion tweeter in black (rather than yellow of yore) and new woofers, the Motion models have woven fibre cones while the more tasty Motion XTs use Kevlar. The floorstanders […]
The Bristol Hi-Fi Show 2023 pt.1 The Bristol Hi-Fi Show 23 is the first of its kind since the pandemic. Run by retail chain Audio-T it has been running for as long as I’ve been involved in the industry, with my first visit back in 1989 when the hotel was a Holiday Inn and I […]
Milano hi-fidelity is a high-end audio event befitting the global capital of fashion and design staged at a five-star hotel over a pleasantly warm weekend when we wished the building’s air conditioning had not been switched off for winter. With free entry and a free catalogue, no wonder the event was popular from the moment […]
Manron, from Łubianka in north-west Poland, created an impressive display with their stunning loudspeaker cabinets along with tube amplification. Speakers are the static Lambda 80 (from €5,499) and the amazing Lambda 120 (€13,199) with its swivel top-section housing the Scan-Speak midrange and tweeter. This is a patent-pending design element. The company even commissioned their recording […]
After two years without a high-end show, audiophiles flocked in huge numbers to the first event in the Polish capital since Covid struck; in greater numbers than the organisers could possibly have imagined. They queued, patiently to pay their £10 entry; they queued to visit rooms and hear systems; they queued for food and drink, […]