What more is there to add. A bit of a piece on horn loudspeakers we saw at High End in Munich and HIfi Deluxe. 

Orange Avantgarde Acoustic Trio speakers, I suspect they will be XDs, with a single pair of Avantgarde bass horns.

The first room we happened across with Cessaro horns in them.

And this was the second room with Cessaro in there. At fits glance you may be forgiven for thinking the amps are by Kondo but they are also Cessaro. We think Cessaro had these speakers specially done to match Linette’s hair.

These are the JBL 4306 proving that not all horn designs need a mansion to accommodate them. This was a new product for 2018 and incorporates an 8 inch woofer with a dome tweeter with compression driver.

The Silbatech room. OH my word. I love this room every year we walk through the door.The speakers playing (On Air) are the Western Electric Monitor System 757-A that incorporate a 728 woofer, 713C Driver into a KS12027 horn. Frequency response is 60 to 15 000Hz and they are 4 Ohms. Hw they filled such a big room is a tad beyond me but they did so very well.

When I win the lottery the first thing I will do is buy a plot of land in the sun somewhere. The second thing I will do is get Huff to build me a bespoke house with a huge listening room built around perfectly accommodating these Avantgarde Trios with 3 pairs of bass horns. I love the Avantgarde sound and we own the Duo XDs in the red down at the bottom of this group of pictures, so we are a bit biased. Heard these on press day when the room was empty and they energised the room a tad too much but when the room is full it’s a totally different matter.

The Pnoe speakers from Arcadian Audio are made in Athens, Greece and use no crossover in their design. The second picture is of the JoSound Horus loudspeaker. Sadly we were pressed for time and only got to her the Pnoes.

I thought this was an interesting design from EA-Listen Euphonic Architect. The speakers you se on top are only part of the story and the bass unit makes up the bass part of the system. Amps are from Merrill Audio and were debuting at the show…but more on them elsewhere in our coverage. I think this speaker system goes to show that the modern home can accommodate high end audio.

This is German brand Odeon Audio. Whilst these are large speakers they do make much more smaller home friendly designs that all incorporate horns in some way.

Holger Stein heads up Stein Music who come from Germany. They make a wide range of speakers from about €4.5K but the big bad boys you see here are the TopLine XL costing a cool €128 000.

I’ll be writing more about this room later and so this is a brief introduction to a wonderful loudspeaker system from Greek brand Tune Audio. The speakers here are their range topping Avatos which is a three way, entirely passive design. This room got very emotional and made me physically cry…but more of that later.

No visit to High End Munich is complete without visiting Living Voice and experiencing this set up. The attention to detail these guys go to is utterly breath-taking which can be demonstrated if you look at the blue boxes at the back of the room…this is all electrical supplies to ensure a clean signal. The horns weren’t playing when we popped in but the more conventional OBX range speakers really were singing at the show…but more on that later too.

We have a pair of the hORNS Mummy loudspeakers from Poland but they do need to get a bigger room at High End if at all possible to really showcase their designs. Room was packed with people as it always is.

These are speakers from AER. The smaller ones are the Jazz range which cost €15 000 with the sub you can see at the back of the room. They have no crossover and use an AER Excenter horn to create a speaker that is 100db sensitive. The company is really best known for its drivers which are also used in JoSound speakers mentioned above.

This is the Acapella Apollon which uses a 780mm ‘hyper-spherical’ horn and an ion tweeter again in a spherical horn. In the cabinets are housed 6 ten inch drivers that produce the bass which takes them down to a claimed 20Hz. These will set you back around $144 000.

These speakers from Italian brand Diesis Audio. The lower section houses 2 15 inch woofer in open baffles. Wiring throughout is with silver  Kondo (did you spot the amps?). Frequency response in environment from 27 to 40000Hz a +/-3db

OK, this is going to upset the audiophiles on a budget brigade but this system from Chinese company ESD Acoustics and it was one of the standouts for me…to the point I dragged a few people along to experience they system. The system here has everything from Bass horns to tweeters to electronic crossover, amps and power supplies. The sound was pretty stunning, though I’m sure it will not be to everyone’s taste. Price is around €800 000 for the lot.

Total DAC Is built by Vincent Brient just up the road from us in Mont St Michel, Brittany France. This was a great sounding system and was made up of Totaldac RoonReady d1-server and reclocker, Totaldac optimised server/NAS for Roon or for UPNP/DLNA, Totaldac d1-twelve DAC, Totaldac d1-driver, a volume-free preamp, Totaldac/Bibacord AES-EBU cables, Totaldac USB GIGAFILTER and ethernet cable/filters
Totaldac d150 speakers and their subwoofers, Absolare 845 push pull monoblocs with Elrog tubes, Echole Limited Edition interconnect cables, speaker cables and power cords, Shunyata Hydra Triton V3 power distributor and Sigma NR power cords and a Lab Gruppen FP7000 amplifier for the subwoofers. We will be visiting Vincent shortly for a full and proper demonstration of this system.

Read all the High End Munich 2018 coverage here!