Munich 2013

The Munich High End Show is probably the world's best attended audio event and the industry's most important. It is of greater significance than even the International Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January.

"High End" began more than thirty years ago as a relatively small consumer-based show held in Frankfurt's Kempinski Hotel. Even as recently as the 1990s, when I first attended, it closely resembled an American audio show: a hotel room and hotel convention center based event that drew a few thousand attendees. It was an intimate and almost cozy affair.

The show outgrew the Kempinski and the organizers took a chance, moving it to Munich and into a large convention center. Imagine an audio show at say, The Javits Center in New York City, home of the annual International Automobile Show. That seemed outrageous at the time and many felt it would be the show's death knell both because of the venue's size and because of the lack of hotel room type demonstrations spaces.

But in fact, the venue change spurred growth both in the number of attendees and in the number of participants.

While the show doesn't occupy the entire convention center it does most of it and throughout the show the exhibition halls and upper area rooms remain extremely crowded with both industry types, press and consumers. Exhibitors get to demonstrate their gear to both local consumers and to worldwide distributors. Business gets done at this show, probably more than gets done at CES. One reason for that is clear: the timing.

A show in May is when you do your buying for the next Christmas season, not in January directly after the Christmas buying season. Attend this show and you feel as if you're part of a relatively large, definitely thriving industry not part of a small dissident, fringe group showing "off site" as you feel at CES or even worse at one of the regional American shows where you attain "dying breed" status.

How is it that audio is important enough to attain convention center status in Europe and "dying breed" status in America? How is it that Germany easily supports more than a half dozen thriving audio magazines and America manages two? Why does owning a fine audio system remain aspirational in Europe and a punch line in America?

Its partly cultural. Germany is the birth place of Beethoven. In Poland, where the Warsaw audio show occupies three hotels and draws in excess of 6000 attendees, the airport is named after Chopin. Sadly I bet most Americans don't know who that is.

While this might cut into your audio expenditures, I most highly recommend you consider attending this show next year or the year after that. Start saving your money now and go. You'll be invigorated. You'll realize that your hobby and your passion is one shared by millions of people around the world.

Rather than being convinced by the mainstream print media and the Internet based 'gadget' nudnicks that hi performance audio is a 'dying' hobby and business, you'll see a relatively young demographic and super enthusiasm and interest.

If you are a vinyl enthusiast, you will be rewarded with a selection of turntables, tonearms and accessories, not to mention vinyl for sale, the likes of which you'll not find at any other audio show—at least among the ones I've attended. Vinyl enthusiasts come from all over the world and especially from all over Europe.

As it turns out, the reasonably large upstairs demo rooms have decent acoustical properties and many rooms feature excellent sound.

That said, turning this show into an "audio competition" is a pointless exercise in my opinion. Some rooms sounded great, others not but there are many reasons for this including set-up expertise but of greater significance is politics and partnering.

Some manufacturers get roped into sharing rooms with manufacturers whose products aren't necessarily the best fit but because of distribution channels and other issues, they are forced into it. Rather than create what I consider to be a pointless sonic hierarchy, I'd just like to point out a few rooms that impressed me.

The Kaiser/Thrax/EnKlein (cables) room immediately comes to mind. As did the Constellation/TAD room—at least on day two. Day one the sound was lacking in high frequency air and was somewhat congested. What changed? Cables. But I won't mention the day one brand because they are very good cables but not for that system. I didn't find the Estellon room at CES all that impressive but in Munich driven by Vitus electronics, the sound was mesmerizing. The sound in the Siltech SAGA/Crystal Cable Absolute Dream room was as impressive in Munich as it was at CES. The MBL room always sounds good. Ditto Vandersteen/Brinkmann including Brinkmann electronics.

Another standout was the Ypsilon/Bergmann/Rosso Fiorentino speaker room, but I'll stop now because the point is, there is no point in droning on about how great the sound was in particular rooms because at this show, with a few exceptions, most rooms were making musical sound.

Munich High End is not a show for dreamers and amateurs. Check it out yourself if you can. You will not leave disappointed!