UK HIFI SHOW LIVE 2023 SHOW REPORT, PART 1, FROM ERIC VAN SPELDE

For the second time since 2019 – its absence in the interim having been for obvious reasons – what is to become the UK´s premier audio show opened its doors from Friday, September 29th to Sunday, October 1st, now in the huge and rather posh surroundings of Ascot Race Course.

And no – you couldn´t place a bet on Best Sound of the Show or anything like that… Well over a hundred exhibitors were present, although one was hard-pressed to notice, let alone find them all – the place is that large!

Ascot Race Course might be an old institution, dating from as far back as 1716, the Grandstand in which the event took place, is rather more modern having been opened in 2006. Despite there being dozens of Ascot guides (marshalls, whatever) in traditional uniforms to help out first-time visitors, the place does have its quirks. From the entrance halls, there were escalators to the second and fourth levels, but not to the first (was there even a first?) and third; there were stairs to all floors if you could find them, and an elevator that one needed to use to go to the fifth level where a couple of big hitters such as Absolute Sounds resided – although the sign outside the elevator said one could only use it to go to the second, fourth and sixth levels – et cetera. I settled on a strategy of starting at the very furthest room from the entrance hall on the sixth floor, and working my way back from there. Which was all good and well until I realised time was running away from me at a pretty fast rate, and it was high time to find room two point something where Kii was having a press launch. Phew, made it in time. Then it made sense to go on with the rest of Level 2, and there went my original plan… At Ascot, you tend to do a significant mileage when you want to see everything, as everything seems so far apart and it is not always obvious how to get where you need to be. The upside: no traffic jams in the corridors, and because there are always a few empty rooms between exhibitors, no problems with sound spilling over from one room to another – except when the same exhibitor has two adjacent rooms and holds demos simultaneously. On Friday – press and trade only – most rooms were lightly trafficked with some exhibitors seeming to be a bit miffed, or disinterested in manning the room seeing as no one had been inside for extended periods. Saturday was altogether livelier, although – apart from one or two instances where big brands had booked a modest space relative to their stature – you´d be hard-pressed to call it ´crowded´ compared to some hotel shows with tightly packed rooms and corridors.

As always, there are trends to observe. As expected, the British brands – from one-man bands to the huge ´n corporate- were there, as were the big hitters from the USA with German and Italian brands less well represented relative to their respective global market shares in the high-end sector. Streaming was the de facto standard in the vast majority of rooms – with the usual network glitches seeming to be few and far between in this venue – with Kevin Scott of Definitive Audio bucking the trend by switching between two turntable setups during his demonstrations, with no digital source in sight. And although there were many hundreds of brands on display, there was a slight sense of sameness percolating through it all. The exhibitors that don´t have a high-end streaming front end in their portfolio, almost universally settled on Innuos. A majority of the ones who concentrate on source components and/or amplification on a suitably high price and quality level chose to demonstrate their wares on Wilson Audio speakers, of which a disproportionate number were in use throughout the premises. Refreshing was a good proportion of exhibitors taking a rather less stuffy approach to their choice of music to demo their systems with in favour of tunes and artists that actually have a following outside the microcosmos of ´audiophiles´ – from Lowther playing the Tiesto remix of Delerium feat. Sarah McLaughlan´s ´Silence´ on their biggest horns via Tricky´s Maxinquaye LP, several Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode cuts, as well as Radiohead´s ´Paranoid Android´ to Mr Oizo´s 1999 banger ´Flat Beat´ at Sound Fowndations – there was enough being played that was recognisable to those whose formative years were in the ´80s and ´90s as well. This makes sense, given that the baby-boom generation audiophile that has made up for the lion´s share of high-end audio sales over the past two or three decades, is at an age where they sooner divest of their material possessions than to buy a HiFi or upgrade their equipment – something that hitherto seemingly went unnoticed by the industry, but quite obviously no more…

Bowers & Wilkins demoed the new 805 Signature on Classe Delta Series amplification with streaming provided by Innuos. According to B & W´s UK account manager Tony Smith, despite the 800 Signature series only being carried by less than ten of the top UK dealers, the order intake for the new all-out versions surpasses those of the regular 800 Series by a significant margin. ´Customers who contemplate spending 7,000 pounds on an 805, for instance, turn out to be more than willing to stretch their budget to 10,000 pounds to get the very best,´ says Smith. Also, some of the new technologies that resulted from the research for the 800 Signature series, have already trickled down to B & W´s bread-and-butter 600 Series.

French speaker manufacturer Triangle showed off their top-of-the-line Quatuor Magellan 40^th Anniversaries to best effect using a Manley Steelhead preamplifier and Manley Snapper monoblock tube amps, fronted by Innuos´ Statement 2-box streamer and a Chord Dave DAC with power conditioning provided by Isotek.

Russ Andrews and Kimber Kable laid out their wares in front of two pairs of PMC speakers with the HiFi Rose amp and streamer showing their back panels to the listener – which made eminent sense for a manufacturer of cables and accessories. “The mains supply is the backbone of a HiFi system, really,” says Simon Dalton of Russ Andrews. “In fact, we introduced the first dedicated audio power cable back in the 1970s when no one had yet spent significant thought on the mains supply side of things.” 

Yamaha brought their flagship R-N 2000 A streaming receiver, freshly awarded by EISA, and NS-2000A three-way floorstanding speakers. Despite the acoustic imbalance obvious from the picture – which most of the exhibitors were having to deal with given the nature of these ´skyboxes´ – the system´s rendition Lana Del Ray´s ´Summertime Sadness´ was quite enjoyable, being possessed of depth and scale; thereby supporting the claims the manufacturer makes of the receiver´s built-in Yamaha Parametric Room Acoustic Optimiser. “The thing about our automatic room correction system is that it corrects the dips, troughs and bumps caused by room modes, in which a calculation of first reflection modes is included – but it doesn´t try and make a Dynaudio speaker sound like a Focal or vice versa.” 

Speaking of Focal – no massive, all singing, all dancing, multiple set up lifestyle brand presence of the Focal/Naim powerhouse here; ´just´ a pair of Sopra No.2s and a double rackful of Naim´s 300 Series electronics as introduced at the Munich High End. All steak, no sizzle then – which is actually fine by us. Four acoustic panels, strategically placed behind and aside of the speakers, made the room workable from an acoustic perspective leaving the gear able to display maybe not all, but still a good proportion of its inherent qualities…

A German from Copenhagen in Ascot: Matthias Lück, co-owner of German high-end stalwarts Brinkmann Audio, at the stand of long-standing UK distributors Symmetry Audio. Although Lück is an ´analogue´ man par excellence, having been involved in several record productions among other things, he was also instrumental in the development of the Brinkmann Nyquist Streaming DAC, which was what we were listening to at the show – aided by a pair of monoblock amps of the same manufacturer simply called ´Mono´, going into Wilson Sabrina Xs. A class act that was equally at home with my choice of some Sisters of Mercy as with the ´audiophile´ stuff played beforehand. 

More Wilson Sabrinas at Innuos, where the Statement and Pulsar streamers – the latter having been launched at the last Munich High End – were taking turns playing through a Chord Dave DAC (another exhibitors´ favourite at the show) and a Dan D´Agostino Progression stereo integrated amp. Recent innovations are part of the firmware which gets updated with new functionality every two or three months. We are always looking for ways to improve the listening experience of our users,´ says Innuos´ Head Of Sales Steven Gomes. ´For instance, one of the things we introduce in the latest version of our user interface is the possibility to simply merge or split music categories – so if ´country´ and ´country rock´ are the same thing to you, you can rearrange your music library in this way at a single touch´. 

A high-calibre, minimalist system featured at the Chord Company – not to be confused with Chord Electronics who make things like DACs and amplifiers – as a proving ground to demonstrate their range of cables, mains products and LAN isolators: Innuos server into Chord (Electronics) Dave DAC into a pair of active ATC monitors. As one would expect, each of their products dropped the system´s noise floor a little further when inserted, more so when you got higher up in their range (for instance with the power distributors pictured).

As the quality of our mains supply is deteriorating rapidly through interference from an ever-increasing variety of wireless devices, switched-mode power supplies and – a real biggie this – the inverters from photovoltaic solar panels, audiophiles become ever more aware of the need to do something about it – as effectively when amplifying and processing a music system, we are modulating the mains voltage with it. Power distribution units and cables from Puritan Audio have been repeatedly praised in the press for bringing state-of-the-art mains, er, purifying, at prices that are deemed affordable when compared with the competition at this level. “Mains filtering is a careful balancing act,” says Puritan director Mike Lester. ´Take away just a tad too much, and the sound falls completely flat on its face.” 

Is it a ´lifestyle´ speaker? No, at 27,000 pounds a pair, it isn´t – it´s serious high end. The Node Audio Hylixa comes from a young British company located a few miles south of Cambridge, and although it might look a bit like similarly egg-shaped speakers on stands (in this case integral to the main body) from Eclipse or even Devialet (but without the Daft Punkesque robotic attitude) – this is not an exercise in form before function with a reach-for-the-stars-and-hope-for-the-best price tag. Inside the laser-melted glass and nylon one-piece cabinet there´s a 1.6 metre-long transmission line, a third (bass) driver and not a straight surface in sight. Sitting on the end of a system built around a Melco streamer, Schiit Audio Yggdrasil DAC and Valve amplification, the result was big sound with a wide, deep and high soundstage, extremely clean, natural and elegant with strong vocals and bass that was as well defined at it was deep (the makers claim a 39 Hz – 6dB point), if a touch restrained dynamically, presumably owing to its low 82.4 dB sensitivity. Pretty darn impressive and admirable, anyway.

The big product launch at the UK HiFi Show Live was probably that of the Kii Seven standmount wireless, DSP-controlled speaker system (similar to Rega where the turntables get smaller and lighter as you go up the range, with the existing Kii Three being a large floorstanding speaker, at Kii the numbers seem to go up as the package gets smaller). This is A Big Deal for the youngish company – simply put their aim is to take the convenience of the ever-expanding number of Bluetooth-controlled actives from Kef, Klipsch et al and take this to a no-compromise, audiophile-grade sound quality level. First impressions are that Kii succeeded to a larger extent than probably anyone would have thought possible not that long ago. Granted, there is ultimately still a hint of dryness common to all speakers processing the incoming signal in the digital domain over the entire frequency range – but then again, that might not bother the majority of users who do pretty much all their listening from digital media, anyway. All the same, Kraftwerk´s Radio-Activity (albeit a live version) seemed to have lost little if anything of its airiness and grandeur. This is surely a breakthrough product for its intended market and at a not inconsiderable but still sort of reasonable 7,000 pounds a set, it deserves thorough investigation from a large cross-section of the high(ish) end market.

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Go to the next installment of Eric’s Ascot coverage…..

Eric van Spelde

For all the UK HiFi Show Live 2023 coverage from Ascot, click here