HIGH END MUNICH 2022 INTRODUCTION AND VOXATIV, WADAX, WILSON BENESCH, ALSYVOX, LAMPIZATOR and JADIS

High End Munich has always been my favourite HiFi show and I don’t think I would be over-egging the pudding to say that Munich High End is the greatest audio show on earth, and by default, and assuming we are as far as we know at the moment alone in the Universe, the greatest audio show in the universe.

I’m a bit of a fan, does it show?

Anyway, from a HiFi Pig perspective we were highly excited, and given that apart from the Paris show way back in October of last year this would be the first show we’ve been to since the outbreak of Covid, I don’t think I could have been more highly charged.

To add to the excitement, we had booked a 4m tower in HiFi Pig PINK outside Hall One of the MOC by way of letting visitors to the site know how much we love visiting the show and really to add a bit of an air of fun to our visit. You can still be in with a chance of winning a fabulous turntable from AVIDHIFI and here is the link.

Anyway, after a bit of a journey, we arrived and were picked up at the airport in Munich by our lovely friends and HiFi Pig ambassadors Andreas and Kirsten – thanks guys! A speedy check in to the hotel and straight to the MOC to have a look at the HiFi Pig Selfie Tower, though walking through the halls during setup meant meeting lots of folk we haven’t seen in ages and so what we expected being a ten minute trip took a couple of hours or so.

Dinner in an Indian restaurant close to the hotel with the guys from GIK Acoustics, though we also bumped into Walter and Rondi from Krell, Lasse from Little Fwend and loads of other folk in the industry. Really, the High End Munich show really does mean that pretty much wherever you turn you will find someone from the HiFi world ready to chat and catch up about what’s happened since the last time you met up at whatever show it may have been around the world.

After a relatively early night we are up early the next day with cameras, extra batteries, show passes and whatnot all packed up and ready to be at the MOC by 10.

This year was a little different to previous years in that there were trade-only days on Thursday and Friday, with the show being open to the general public on Saturday and Sunday. There was a real sense of anticipation in the air and you could really feel that Munich High End was going to be something special this year.

I hope that with our reports and thoughts over the next few days we manage not only to convey a feeling of what the Munich High End show has to offer by way of the excellent audio kit on show, but also an idea of what the atmosphere of the show is like in the hope that it will inspire you to one day visit what I am definitely going to call THE GREATEST AUDIO SHOW ON EARTH…because it is!

Wrist bands acquired it was off to our first meeting/press conference with Raidho, about which Lin will give you more details in her first report, but not before nipping into a couple of rooms by way of whetting our appetites for what was to come. And what a great couple of rooms they were!

First up we went into the Voxtiv room hosted by the lovely Ines Vogel who is, like her products, from Berlin in Germany. Ines was keen to show is the new 9.88 modular speaker system. This is Voxativ’s first expansion to the hybrid-active 9.87 System and gives full-backward compatibility to owners of the current configuration via a stackable, mid-module with a self-contained midrange driver with the full speaker system having an estimated MSRP of $75,000. ,

At the top of the modular system is the Pi-Monitor, a back-loaded horn enclosure sporting a new full-range driver, the AC-4NP that has a new CNC-milled basket, advanced suspension, enhanced paper cone, and new gold-plated magnet system derived from the AC-4F Gold.

Voxativ has also designed the new .01 Mid- Module,  that adds an 8-inch neodymium, low-distortion, low-midrange driver that allows the listener to tailor the sound with three different curves in the musical range where the girth, growl, body, and slam. Ines played us some metal and the effect was pretty spectacular with a real kick to the music.

At the bottom of the stack was a Dipole subwoofer that Voxativ say ( and I don’t doubt them) is linear down to 20 Hz. Inside, two opposing neodymium woofers are actively driven by a 250W Class AB plate amp and there’s crossover, phase, and gain controls accessible in the rear.

All this was being driven by the Voxativ T805 SET Integrated amp (MSRP $34,900) based around the 805 tubes and running in pure Class-A design with KT66 driver stage in triode mode driven by the ECC83 input stage with an internal DC-coupled circuit absent of any interstage chokes. It’s an integrated amp that has a 46-step volume-controlled preamp output stage to directly drive the active subwoofers of the Pi-Bass.

Overall this was a treat for the old lugholes and really set the tone for what was to come, though we certainly thought we may have stumbled upon the best in show right from the off. However, you do need to be aware that the opinions presented in this and the other reports we will publish over the next few days are going to be in the context of this being a show environment with all the hassles that brings for exhibitors. Whatever, the Voxativ room was a bit special.

However, just across the corridor was another spectacular looking system in the form a system consisting of WADAX and Audio Research electronics powering Sheffield (UK) based manufacturer Wilson Benesch’s Eminence flagship loudspeakers. In truth, there have been times when I’ve not been particularly blown away by these speakers but today they sounded excellent, with detail and power aplenty.

Right next door was what it soon became apparent was a system that really did push all my buttons and that, from my perspective at least fast became the system to beat. The ease and scale of the Alsyvox Raffaello speakers (a dipole planar design) being powered by JADIS JA30 power amplifiers and their I70 preamplifier was just stunningly good, with several other people I talked to around the show making very similar comments. Aiding and abetting this already spectacular system was the €44K Lampizator Horizon DAC (I really do want one of these having owned their BIG 7 for several years)  and a Taiko Extreme server. This really is high-end audio at its best and with a sound that I could have just sat and listened to for hours. I’ll talk about JADIS, the French manufacturer later in my wafflings about High End Munich 2022, but they are fast become the amplifiers that really do seem to do it for me. This system will have cost house or very nice motorcar money, but had I the space and the money I’d be beating a path to their door and insisting they take my money and deliver PDQ!

And then it was into the Raidho press conference about which I’m not going to talk too much about, other than to say that whoever called Raidho boring on social media when they got mentioned needs to get their ears sorted! The massive TD6 is new and spectacular, here being driven by Moon electronics but the real star of this particular show was the sub-€6K X1T speaker that sports a Tantalum coated five-and-a-quarter inch ceramic driver with the usual Raidho ribbon (more in Lin’s write up here as she’s the techy one of the outfit!) If you have a smaller space and don’t mind a relatively restricted bass response (around 70Hz is about as low as this little monitor will go) you could do a lot worse than this little beauty. Definitely a bit of a highlight for me!

Stuart Smith

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