HIGH END MUNICH 2022 OCTAVE, AUDIO PHYSICS, CHORD ELECTRONICS, T + A, OSWALDS MILL.

Octave was next along and I think this was another case of the music playing not really grabbing my attention enough to stay and give the system a serious listen. I’m sorry but I listen for pleasure as much as anything and I do find it tough to sit and listen to music that is unappealing…but that’s hardly the fault of the company in question and I am well aware that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this German brand’s offerings many times in the past. What can’t be denied, however, is the beautiful finish and build on those lovely looking Jubilee Mono SE amps that will push out 400W into 4 Ohms using 8 KT120 tubes per amplifier. Price on a pair of these is around €82K.  The speakers on show were the Audio Physic Cardeas at around €24K a pair.

Now it’s been a long time since we’ve seen Moz from Chord Electronics and I must confess that most of our time in this room was spent nattering about one thing and another. The system was very nice sounding and there seemed to be appreciative noises coming from the folk in the room, which is usually a good sign. We did pass a few times to see Colin that works for Chord Electronics by way of extending the natter, but he was forever in meetings with distributors and the like which would suggest that business is very good for this classic British brand.

T+A always have a very nice room at Munich and it’s usually a nice oasis of calm in the maelstrom of nuttiness that goes on outside at High End. In the back they had a nice sounding system playing HA200 headphone amp. There’s all kinds of outlandish design out there in HiFi-Land but T+A manage to combine a modern aesthetic without wanting to shock.

They say you should never meet your heroes and I’ve been a long term fan of the American icon that I have been itching to hear for years and years. The turntable is the K3 which feeds the PD2 phonostage and the Special K amplifier, whilst speakers were the Museum speakers.  Everything in this room is a piece of engineering art and I absolutely love the aesthetics of the products as well as the engineering that has gone into each of them.

The amp, and integrated, is a Class A design using the KT88 tube to deliver 50W a channel and you’d have to be daft or have zero appreciation of industrial design not to appreciate this beast. Likewise, the K3 turntable is a work of art of the direct-drive variety and with a tonearm that uses the 3D metal printing process SLM (Selective Laser Melting), “whereby an aerospace aluminium alloy powder is fused by a laser into a form impossible to fabricate any other way.” This kind of stuff is dedication to audiophilia at its highest and as I suggested I was very excited about hearing this system – perhaps more than any other system at the show. I mean, who cannot be impressed by a loudspeaker that was created for the Guggenheim Museum in New York? It’s a beautiful and stunning system, that is for sure but both myself and Linette left the room feeling somewhat underwhelmed by the sound of the OMA set up, with both of us saying that it sounded harsh at the top end. Now, I have spoken to a good number of people at High End Munich and the general consensus has been that the OMA system was fantastic and so I can only assume that the tune playing was unduly harsh or we caught the system at a bad moment. Has this dampened my enthusiasm for this brand? Not at all and I really do look forward to listening to the system again with the hope that my experience was a one-off and down to the music playing.

Stuart Smith

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