28 May Munich High End Show 2022
Finally the covid Saga has settled a bit and this May Munich was awaiting every audiophile and music lover back to its spectacular High End show. What an amazing feeling to be there after several year pause. Wow… All these luxury hi-fi and hi-end setups, manufacturers, reporters, distributors, familiar people and friends… Such a nice feeling of belonging to this very special community of music lovers.
As you might know the exhibition is vast and even four days are not enough to accurately test and enjoy each room and system. Thus we decided to start from the top floors as usually simultaneously visiting first floor for relax and for headphone experience. From the 1st glace we have found very small amount of cd players compared to last years. Now the trend is network players, roon, ethernet, etc. Great and alas that cd eventually died even on High End show. Good that we still have tubes and vinyl which became even more popular this year as it seemed to us. Some people used to say that cables will extinguish as well in the nearest time, however there is something special here, same as with tubes and vinyl – emotional and beautiful. So we do hope that it will not be soon.
Also we noticed that more and more headphone manufacturers organize dedicated rooms for their products. The setups could be €20k+ as in Dcs cabin or could be much more affordable like Meze had. Reviera sounded so delighted and good, Meze 109 pro headphone was a pleasant surprise, Feliks audio were at the top (we definitely need to perform more cable comparisons on tube amps). Valkyria from Spirit Torino were probbaly the most expensive headphones this year at Munich. There was something charming about them similar as with Italian sport cars. We also liked the latest HE-R9 from Hifimans, great product for the price. We will shortly introduce silver cable for them too.
Special praise to Alsyvox for their remarkable speakers and so balanced setup. We stayed for almost two hours in the room where initially planned to spend only 10-15mins – that was Wadax and Wilson Benesch. You simply cannot go away, the sound is so tempting and once the new song starts, you promise that it will be the last one. This repeated for more than an hour. Raidho was like a home room, their latest x1.6 sounded so epic and powerful. Bravo! We stayed with Nagra for more than an hour as well, what a lovely system, so open and revealing, airy and with enormous clarity. We would also highlight Epitome from Tune Audio paired with Serbian Trafomatic audio which sounded so natural and alive while being probably one of the most beautiful tube amps on the show.
Overall these were spectacular four days in Munich and our highest recommendations for every audiophile and music lover is to find time and come next year. It does worth efforts and time.
We have also made small photo gallery below, hope you will enjoy it.
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