iEAR TILBURG SHOW REPORT

HiFi Pig’s Eric van Spelde visited the iEar show in Tilburg, here’s his show report.

´Gezellig´ is a Dutch word that doesn´t have a direct synonym in English: it can mean ´cosy´ when we´re talking about a room, venue or a style of interior decoration, but it also means ´sociable´ as in: having simple fun with good friends or people who might be about to become friends, often accompanied by a pint or two and/or food. The people of the Brabant province, not unlike the Bavarians in Germany (is it mere coincidence that the best-known beer brand from Brabant is named Bavaria?) see themselves as ´gezellige´ people par excellence. So, what do the skyboxes in a football stadium in Tilburg – smack in the middle of Brabant – look like? Of course: wooden floors, a large old-school bar with shiny beer pumps, framed pictures on the wall, brown leather chairs, and cozy lighting. The larger halls: more of the same. Food and drink, of course, were available in quantities and quality unknown to most ´hotel shows´. And ´sociable´ the show turned out to be with over 6,000 visitors in two days! This turned out to be a two-edged sword: even on Sunday there were a couple of rooms where we failed to get in and have a proper look/listen around; other demos were compromised – to say the least – by loud talking from the audience.

IEar´ is one of The Netherlands´ larger HiFi dealers with two large bricks and mortar shops in Amsterdam and Tilburg as well as a significant online business. Its portfolio reaches from the mid-priced to the stratosphere and as such, it should be no surprise that most of the better-known brands were out in force in addition to some of the more specialist distributors. The Naim/Focal tandem (oh how we laughed when the two brands married a decade ago as their respective sound signatures did not seem all that compatible; sufficed to say this changed in a rather fundamental way since…) even occupied four rooms – one of them dedicated to head-fi – with Kef and B & W/Denon/Marantz also having multiple presentations.

There were some humdingers among the setups available for one´s perusal at iEar´. Focal and Naim brought out the big guns in the shape of the latest Grande Utopias driven by Naim´s Statement amplifiers with the Solstice turntable system and top-of-the-line ´triple five´ streamer. The large hall in which the system was being presented by Nicolas Debard from Focal who worked the streamer and Naim´s Mark Raggett taking responsibility for the vinyl side of things, was continuously oversubscribed and for good reason. Of course, the scale and dynamics of the Grande Utopia EM Evo in a hall of appropriate size and powered by over a kilowatt of Naim´s finest, are as far removed from your average home system as one can imagine, and then some – but all the same, the sound was possessed of elegance and agility.

It wasn´t the best sound of the show, however. Distributor Music2, which already made an impression at the Dutch Audio Event with a slightly more modest system (well, all is relative…) and lots of thought having been spent on room acoustics, pulled out all the stops and brought the Blumenhofer Gran Gioia 2×16 Turbo´s – all 400 kg per side of it – powered by an all-Van den Hul set of electronics including four monoblock power amps and fronted by the same Reed 1c turntable used in Veldhoven. This was a class act – all refinement, immediacy and intimacy – and rightfully took the ´Best Sound´ Award of the show.

Apparently, however, the Terrason Audio room with the big Vivid Audio Giya G4s, the Grimm Audio MU1 all-in-one streaming-based device, a Mola-Mola analogue preamp and some huge Halcro Eclipse monoblocks from Australia was said to have been pretty close on the judges´ score sheets for sound quality. This was another spectacular room – I don´t think I ever heard Vivid speakers sounding so ballsy – something which was aptly demonstrated when the noise from the audience reached 80 dB peaks and it was decided on the spot to overcome this ´background´ by playing some fairly commercial trance music with female vocals (could have been an Armin van Buuren live show, but we´re not sure) LOUD.  This was something the Giya G3s I had in my own listening room way back definitely didn´t do with anything like this level of conviction…

Terrason also demoed a more ´down to earth´ system in what would be considered a typical domestic environment – equipment placed on a sideboard with a TV hanging above, and speakers on either side, close to the rear wall. Another Mola-Mola amp, an integrated this time, was driving a pair of smaller Vivid Audio speakers – the Kaya S12 standmounts – with another Grimm MU1 providing the source.

Rega and Totem distributor Joenit chose a back-to-basics approach: Rega Planar 6 with Exact cartridge, Rega Elicit Mk 5 amplifier and some smallish Totem floorstanders with nothing else in the room to divert attention. It´s safe to say this strategy worked:  of course, a set up like this might be some way off the sheer scale and level of detail of the half-a-million-pound systems in the larger halls, however away from that shock-and-awe factor Rega is well known for its ability to get the musical message across and with the Totems being willing and able partners, it showed here too with no digital artefacts or acoustic imbalances from overpowering a given room to detract from the performance.

Monitor Audio had an unusually strong presence at iEar´ by way of their Dutch subsidiary, having booked two rooms. There´s a wind of change blowing at MA with a new and relatively young design team, with the new Platinum range of speakers giving hints of where the journey will be going. In one room, the Platinum 300 G was being powered by Leema electronics with a Transrotor turntable performing analogue front line duties, while in the other room a Roksan Attessa Streaming Amplifier worked the voice coils of a pair of Gold 300 floorstanders to pleasant effect.

IsoAcoustics´ sales director Paul Morrison travelled all the way from Canada to demonstrate the firm´s range of decoupling footers and associated items at iEar´. For this, two identical pairs of Focal Kanta speakers were placed right next to each other, one on the factory-supplied spikes and the other on Gaia series decouplers, with some clever doodah randomly switching between the two. Even in less than ideal conditions it was obvious that decoupling the speakers from the floor cleaned up the sound no end.

Long-standing Dutch audio distributors Viertron, just like Joenit, had a first-floor skybox at its disposal and opted for an even more minimalist approach: just an SDA 200 Signature Atoll streamer/amp and a pair of Perlisten R5t speakers which look fairly conventional at first, until you look at the array of triple tweeters, one in the center of a waveguide and one each above and below it…

HNNY is best known as REL´s distributor in The Netherlands; however, they also represent the interests of Heed and Fyne Audio, while the turntable systems of New Horizon and the Plenq (which is more or less phonetic Dutch for ´shelf´) equipment supports are fairly recent additions to the portfolio. HNNY chose the 33,000 euro/pair Fyne F1.10S speakers from Scotland, augmented by the Reference Series REL No.31 subwoofer out of Wales at the business end for their demo system – which automatically implied some kind of financial imbalance with the electronics, as even the top of the line Heed Thesis Series components are still considered ´mid-priced´ in the current market at retail prices between a bit over 2,000 euro and roughly 3,500 euro per box (although the system did use two of the latter in the shape of the Omega monoblocks, pushing the price of the pre/power combo up to just under five figures. No matter, the end result sounded just Fyne, er fine – although we would have liked to hear the interesting New Horizon GDS MkII record deck (5,500 euro), too.

No Kore at Dali Benelux – instead, it was all about NAD´s reimagining of their very first product launched fifty years ago. The C 3050 LE , of which only 1,972 copies will be built, may look almost exactly like its forebear – in fact, with its enclosure clad in walnut it looks even more ´retro´ –  inside it´s a completely different beast. It´s built around the Hybrid Digital UcD technology known from other recent NAD amplifiers, features Dirac room correction and has an all-singing, all-dancing streaming module that speaks fluent Apple Airplay, Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect. Hence, here too we were confronted by a system consisting of a single ´box´ plus a pair of (Dali Opticon 6) speakers that did all you can reasonably expect of it – but please, don´t tell your house-proud partner or they might seriously contemplate the necessity of having so many HiFi components in the living…

AudioQuest literally turned things around in their demo room – that is, the Primare components that were driving the GoldenEar Triton speakers (semi-active, 13,000 euro/pair) had their ´business ends´ turned towards the audience for a demonstration of the new AudioQuest Mythical Creatures series interconnects. While all the other cables in the system were from AQs highest-end range, between pre and power amps was a standard Mogami interconnect which, after listening to a track, was changed to the AudioQuest Black Beauty with the same track being played again, followed by the same procedure with the Pegasus interconnect being substituted. A classic ´good – better – best´ demonstration, well executed.

Just like at the Dutch Audio Event, Network Media Systems from Arnhem focused on Roon and the streamers and amplifiers from Hifi Rose, a brand in the ascendance of which sounds from the field suggest that the amplifiers can hold their head up high when compared to Japanese high-end royalty – in an ambiance that managed to be ´technical´ and cozy at the same time. As per the Veldhoven show, the speakers used were modestly sized Sonus Faber floorstanders and there was ample opportunity to have the ins and outs of audio and video streaming explained.

KEF brought the Blades as per expectations, but the adjacent room in which the LS60 Wireless speakers were being demonstrated, was perpetually filled to the gills as well.  Instead of detailing every single technical aspect of the speakers, radio and TV music personality Jan Douwe Kroeske and KEF ambassador Johan Coorg were entertaining the audience with anecdotes and most of all, music! The sound from these slim wireless columns was pretty special as well.

Another room that was ´full house´ pretty much all of the time, even though it was along a hallway that wasn´t really in a direct line of traffic, was that of IDC Klaassen where FinkTeam´s Kim was doing the (loud)speaking, sitting on the end of a stack of Esoteric equipment, of which the S-05 30 Watt Class A power amp was a genuine premiere. Mains treatment and cables were courtesy of Isotek. A classy ensemble that mostly played directly from CD, which was a breath of fresh air in itself after the square gazillion streaming-based systems. On the side, the new Epos ES14n, another reimagined version of a classic, was casually parked under a ´back to the ´90s´ poster.

City Audio Trade is distributor of quite a few highly interesting brands, het most prolific of which is undoubtedly Thivan Labs from Vietnam. Big, beautiful and very well built valve amplifiers, exemplified by the Magpie 811 that took centre stage in the demo system, 36 kg worth of single ended, non-feedback integrated amp with point-to-point wiring throughout and in-house built transformers, all for a very reasonable 4.200 euro. A Thivan Labs DAC fed by a CEC cd transport and Aurender streamer formed the digital branch, while on the analogue side of things a Pre-Audio DE-1800 BLCD (5.940 euro) linear tracking turntable with air bearing tangential tonearm and a granite plinth with Skyanalog G-1 MC cartridge and a hastily borrowed Fezz Audio phono stage (delivery of the designated phono preamp for the demo system was delayed, as is often the case nowadays) were taking care of things. Loudspeakers were Lyric Moon River 8 single driver systems; power conditioning and cables came courtesy of Audes. Sadly, only streaming was being used for the demo as ´the phono stage isn´t quite up to the standard set rest of the system´; we would have loved to hear it anyway as there was much to like about the sound the set up was making digitally but in all honesty, to us a proper vinyl rig still has something streaming cannot offer even with supposedly ´lesser´ equipment…

Another room of Focal/Naim was dedicated to Focal´s headphone portfolio – an array of Naim´s  3,000 euro streamer/headphone amp Atom Headphone Edition was used to provide the Celestee (1,000 euro), Clear MG (1,500 euro) and Stellia (3,000 euro) headphones with music. They weren´t all playing the same music at the same time though for a direct back-to-back comparison but it´s clear these are serious cans for serious headphone users.  Focal also showed off their brand new wireless Bathys ´phones (800 euro).

… and yet another Focal/Naim room. Here, the Naim Uniti Star all-in-one streaming-based system was playing Focal´s Aria 926. Punters could buy this combo with a 1,000 euro discount at (or right after) the show – not a bad thing to find under the Christmas tree…

Dynaudio had two set ups on demonstration; we mainly focused on the Special Forty monitors with Auralic providing the source equipment. A straight up, honest affair that was also more involving than the sightly aloof Dynaudio sound of years gone past.

Dimex, distributors for Spendor, Cambridge, melco and Tellurium Q occupied another very large room in which the equipment on demo was rotated every half hour. When we were there, hence, it was a set up consisting of the Spendor A7 floorstanders with a stack of Cambridge CX-series electronics as the supporting cast. A solid performance that didn´t seem to be overwhelmed at all by the huge space.

In the wide open spaces between rooms, Pro-Ject were showing off their huge portfolio of turntables mainly, Creston brought a cross section of their smart home and custom install audio/video solutions, AudioQuest not only had built a shop for cables and accessories but also demoed a pair of GoldenEar monitors that did a most admirable job given the less than ideal conditions and this being the weekend after Black Friday, iEar´ had an outlet with a cubic boatload of gear being sold off at sizeable discounts…

Outside, the newest Lotus near-supercar, the Emira, was waiting. Not to make a quick gataway from the show – apparently it´s the main prize in a KEF sweepstake, being equipped with a KEF audio system itself.

Eric van Spelde

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