A HORN SPECIAL HIGH END MUNICH 2024 REPORT FROM HIFI PIG’S ERIC

Planet Daft Speakers calling – nowhere else in the world will one find as many big frigging horn systems as in Munich during the High End.

Germans and Japanese always loved them (Stu and Lin too), and now the Chinese are getting in on the act. And who better to give the full tour than Eric van Spelde, who´s been living on said planet far too long now…

A CAPELLA

Duisburg, the westernmost city of the Ruhr area where all the coal mines and steel factories used to be, is mainly known for two things – Hauptkommisar Horst Schimanski of Tatort fame, and horn speaker pioneers A Capella, founded by Alfred Rudolph in the early 1980s (okay, that last bit might be a bit of an exaggeration. But everyone here who lived through the ´80s knows Schimanski). Their speakers mostly feature plasma tweeters and what they call ´hyperspherical´ horns – both of which properties set them apart from competitors. Although A Capella has been a cornerstone of the High End in the early days when the show was still being held in the Kempinksi Hotel in Frankfurt am Main, I can´t remember them having had a demo room in recent years. They were definitely present at the 2024 edition though – a large, darkened room featuring the two and a half meter high Hyperion speakers featuring hyperspherical horns of a whopping 78 cm diameter, supported by an eight-piece suite of 15-inch bass drivers and driven by their own amplifiers. There was also a turntable with what looked like a hundred-inch tonearm made entirely of wood. Wonderfully utopian stuff which wouldn´t mean a thing if it didn´t sound utterly mesmerizing – which, fortunately, it did.  Cinemascopic soundstage, utterly natural dynamics and near-complete freedom from the notion of mechanical sound reproduction. Alas, even within the rarefied stratosphere of large horn systems, A Capella gear tends to be, erm, a bit spendy. The speakers alone were probably as much as a house in a reasonable area of Germany. 

ARIES CERAT

Along with the Chinese at ESD, this was probably Planet Daft Speakers´ capital. This system called Contendo II, mostly built up by Munich dealer and Aries Cerat distributor Klangloft, was so plain big and widely spaced out in the room that after a few efforts, I gave up trying to get it all in one picture – not helped by the hordes strolling through it all. The outer limits were defined by two huge stacks of subwoofers using back loaded horns on a sextet of rear-mounted 8-inch drivers; on their insides were horns with a diameter of about 1.2 metres housed in enclosures that were spherical apart from the horn mouth; a pair of similarly shaped horns, but smaller, in highly polished wood and with horn mouths that opened up by more than the usual 90 degrees which was being worked by two compression drivers per channel, with a pair of elongated, oblong shaped ribbon tweeters on top. The development of this system is actually the reason the company was founded in 2010. It´s all passive and how on Earth the people that designed and built it managed to make it all work with any measure of top-to-bottom consistency and temporal coherence, I don´t know – must be some kind of magic or something. Just how good it is ultimately, I can´t tell you either – too many people walking around and talking, without the system playing, the level of ´background´ noise must have been in the 70+ dB range…

AVANTGARDE ACOUSTIC

Probably the best-known of horn manufacturers, Avantgarde Acoustic always resides in one of the large glass ´showroom´ booths around the first floor Atrium above Hall 4 – which means their visual presentation is as slick and classy as you´d expect but despite their speakers having DSP-processed low frequency control facilities, they´re not going to win any Best Sound of Show awards with the high SPLs they tend to play their big horns at tending to excite a myriad of room modes – which is a shame as we know their speakers are capable of seriously upsetting the million (and more) dollar/pound/euro systems high end apple tree. Angie Lisi of American Sound of Canada was at the Avantgarde booth, too – she does regularly get Best of Show mentions from reviewers using Avantgardes on the other side of the big pond…
The big news was twofold – with the new Mezzo G3 all of the Avantgarde line now has been replaced with the 3rd generation. On top everything, we already know from the Duo models – new high-frequency horns, upgraded midrange and bass drivers, upgraded crossovers, new frames, and of course the option of fully active operation with the ITRON current drive amplifiers, the transformation from Duo Mezzo XD to Mezzo G3 is pretty fundamental in the bass department, where it now features a horn-loaded bass reflex concept deriving from the great theatre horn systems of the mid-20th century. This promises effortless and nearly unlimited dynamic capabilities on the low-frequency department to match the horns.
With the G3 revisions of the core portfolio out of the way, at last development capacity could be freed up to turn the Colibri concept shown last year into production reality. Yes, the new baby Avantgardes with a price tag the reads four figures rather than (deep into) five or six will go to market this year.  Avantgarde founder Holger Fromme has a clear idea of where the high-end audio market will go in the future. ´Virtually everyone has enough computing power in his back pocket now to do full justice to the dynamics of modern, often electronic, music genres. The bottleneck now is at the transducer side of things.  Younger generations buy expensive headphones in the millions and won´t want to compromise on the dynamics and intensity of their musical experience in clubs and concert halls when in comes to choosing loudspeakers for the home – which is where we come in with our ´condensed´ horn speaker concept combined with an 18-inch subwoofer´. 

CESSARO

The third German horn speaker manufacturer in this round-up, and we´re far from done yet…
After (wisely, for the European market at least) having concentrated on smaller speakers like the Opus One which was introduced here back in 2022, the team around Ralph Krebs brought something unapologetically large with the bass as well as mids and highs coming by way of a front-loaded horn. With the drivers being time aligned at the horn throats, this means that the bass horns extend by about two metres towards the listener – which probably disqualifies this sort of system for use in anything but dedicated listening spaces. The Aries Cerat system and the ESD Super Dragon setup made it look relatively compact and practical, though.  Again, I can´t really tell you how good this is ultimately, this time because of some rather generic, plink plonk jazz c.q. hotel lobby music being played.

ESD

As per last year, the massive, all field-coil drivers, Super Dragon speaker system took centre stage in a huge hall at the back of Atrium 4.2; the complete setup with ancillary equipment looked more streamlined and tidier than last time around. This is a huge system throwing an equally huge soundstage and most at home with big sounds like Asian orchestral music with Timpani drums and all or alternatively, bouts of Pink Floyd – that is not to say it´s unrefined, far from it. Some listeners observed that one moment the sound would be utterly mesmerizing, and the next it would be quite obviously ´wrong´ in some way – I did not encounter such moments. I would say the whole presentation was a definite improvement on last year´s, both visually and sonically. ESD seem to be quick learners and must have huge financial clout behind them, looking at what it would cost to ship this lot to Munich and to the US before returning to China…

hORNS

The Polish hORNS brand has always been good for some rather interestingly shaped speakers like the Mummy and the flagship Universum – it must be said the Overture being on the business end of their show system this year, though, had more than a bit of Avantgarde Duo at first glance – a pair of 12-inch woofers in a rectangular enclosure with a small tractrix horn for the highs above and a rather large one for the midrange on top. It´s a somewhat wider, deeper, and more elaborately finished box though, the woofers have aluminium cones, it´s an all-passive system utilizing both 6dB and 12 dB crossover slopes, it uses compression drivers for both midrange (2-inch) and high frequencies (1-inch) and efficiency is a relatively normal 92 dB rather than the extreme 107+ dB stated for the Avantgardes. 

ODEON AUDIO

One of the smaller, artisan speaker manufacturers in Germany, has been building horn loudspeakers for over thirty years now. On demo in Munich were the flagship Carnegie, a large three-way system with all three drivers front horn loaded, combined with a down-firing ported system for the bass driver; and the smaller Nova 2022, a two-way system with a horn-loaded compression driver for the higher frequencies. All speakers are being characterised by lovely woodwork (including the horns themselves) and valve-friendly drive characteristics.  An inviting room to be in with well-balanced sonics. 

STEIN MUSIC

´Original Audio Solutions´ reads the pay-off on the banner in the room of this German manufacturer from Mülheim, North Rhine-Westfalia, and they´re not kidding. Apart from ´regular´ items like amplifiers and three lines of horn speakers, there´s a huge range of accessories for analogue replay and room acoustics, ranging from the fairly normal to the, well let´s say ´esoteric´. It´s about the speakers here and although the Bob L at first glance looks like another Avantgarde-alike – especially with this year´s bright orange hue for the horns – in fact it offers a unique combination of horn loading and open baffle construction. There are three 10-inch woofers at the front, and another six 12-inches on the sides, which are driven by their own DSP-controlled power amp, making this a semi-active system. If that´s not enough at some point, you can upgrade your Bob L´s to Bob XL or even XL+ status by way of additional bass modules. This however isn´t the bigmouth you´d expect purely on form factor, more like a gentle giant that lives by a nuanced, uncoloured, natural and airy presentation. An intriguing proposition, albeit not a cheap one.

SUPRAVOX

Being a French OEM providing speaker units for several well-known high-end brands, mostly of the high efficiency/horn persuasion, Supravox also makes their own line of loudspeakers for professional as well as domestic use. In Hall 2 they presented a rather lovely looking two-way horn system driven by Line Magnetic amplifiers, with digital front-end duties split between Lumin (streamer) and dCS (D/A converter).

THRAX AUDIO

According to yours truly and no one less than Matthias Ruff, head of development at Avantgarde, this was one of the best presentations at this year´s High End. The Thrax Audio Gaida is a big, wide thing looking like a classic studio monitor from the likes of JBL and fully active with DSP. It uses a professional BMS 4599 driver in a mid horn from 300-3000 Hz, a 1-inch compression driver for highs, and a dual 15-inch bass section with motional feedback. It features a current drive amp (which is probably why Ruff, who designed Avantgarde´s ITRON current drive amps, was so keen on hearing them) for each of the compression drivers. In an all-Thrax system, the Gaidas shone with an utterly natural, unforced, coherent and vivid performance. Hearing the Beatles´ Eleanor Rigby was like sitting in the studio with the band, an intense and emotive experience.  

More still to come in our High End Munich 2024 Reports….you can read more on the links below…

High End Munich 2024 Report – Lin and Stu’s Report Part 1

High End Munich 2024 Report – Lin And Stu’s Report Part 2

High End Munich 2024 Report – Oscar’s Halls Report Part 1

High End Munich 2024 Report – Oscar’s Halls And Atrium 3 Report Part 2

High End Munich 2024 Report – Headphones And HeadFi

Eric van Spelde

ALL IMAGES AND TEXT ARE COPYRIGHT HiFi PiG AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN CONSENT FROM THE EDITOR

For all the HiFi PiG High End Munich 2024 coverage, click here