SÜDDEUTSCHE HIFI TAGE 2022 SHOW REPORT

No sooner than we announce he’s joined HiFi Pig’s editorial team do we have a show report from Eric van Spelde. Here we have his report of the Süddeutsche HiFi Tage 2022 that took place over the weekend just gone.

Parallel to the High End in Munich, Germany is home to a series of regional shows under the collective banner of ´Hörtest 20xx´ (Listening test 20xx). The series started in northern Germany and over time has grown counterparts in the west, mid and south German regions. After a Corona-induced pause in 2021 and the beginning of ´22, the Norddeutsche Hifi Tage  that were held late August (postponed from February) in Hamburg meant a welcome return to normality. Hot on the heels of the northern show followed the South German weekend, which took place on September 3rd/4th in Stuttgart. And like often is the case, the best parties were to be found in the smallest rooms…

The venue for the Süddeutsche Hifi Tage was the Holiday Inn at Weilimdorf, a bit outside the city but strategically placed directly opposite the S-Bahn (suburban train network) station. The S6 line provides a direct connection from the city centre that runs twice an hour on Sundays and despite the utter chaos at and around Stuttgart Hbf that has become part and parcel of daily life here since the start of the ´Stuttgart 21´ project sometime in the early noughties, getting there proved to be a quick and stress free affair.

Outside the Holiday Inn, we were greeted by a pair of demo cars of the Audiotec Fischer company out of the Sauerland region, which started in home audio under the Fischer & Fischer brand name and concentrated on high end car audio systems with the Helix and Brax lines.

As integration with the OEM infotainment systems became paramount, a third line ´Match´ was added in the early 2010s. Here, a Peugeot 3008 and an AMG Mercedes C-Class (unsurprisingly, the latter belongs to the company boss) showed how the standard sound systems could be transformed into a truly audiophile experience without changing anything to the base car. At the core of such an upgrade lies a DSP-controlled multichannel amplifier that simply plugs into the car´s original wiring harness.

Of course, the Mercedes with a pair of big subwoofers and a triplet of powerful amplifiers could rattle one’s teeth if desired (interestingly, a quick check with the sound meter app on my phone learned that the sound peaks remained at around 80 dB when the company spokesman Timo Vogelmann briefly turned the wick up to what I perceived as close to ear bleeding levels, there is actually some sort of intelligent compression mode going on in the background…) but the much simpler set up in the Peugeot, with just a pair of tiny wideband speakers positioned in specially built A-pillar covers and a subwoofer added to the 6.5“ speakers in the factory door locations, was actually even more impressive for its natural tonality and soundstaging. According to Renato Rivic of local installers X-Dream who did the conversion, the cost of the lot would be in the region of 1.800 euros which is not that far from what ticking the box for the branded ´upgrade´ sound system at the car dealership, adds to the invoice…

Inside and past the entrance hall, the bigger halls of the venue were taken by the large, established German brands such as Canton (which celebrates its 50th birthday this year), MBL and Backes & Müller. More than, for instance, in the UK or the Netherlands where high quality audio tends to be more of a leftfield hobby, culture has a high priority in German households with high disposable incomes with audiovisual equipment of high perceived quality and value often having a similar level of importance as classy furniture and luxury kitchens. As a result, the visual presentation of the mainstream German brands tends to have more than a hint of ´lifestyle´ about it: loudspeakers tend to be either gloss black or gloss white, electronics often tend to have a rather formal and imposing appearance, and controls are often chrome or gold plated.

The products are invariably very thoroughly engineered and the objective sound quality leaves little if anything to be desired; what is often missing, however, is a direct emotional connection to the music like some of the smaller, more specialist brands can deliver. Loudspeakers are mostly positioned far apart and with just a little ´toe in´ from the straight-ahead position for a broad, imposing soundstage and apart from big orchestral works in order to demonstrate the outer limits of the dynamic envelope, a favoured genre seems to be that of warm, larger-than-life portrayed female voices on a cinemascopic background of deep synths and slowish, BIG hearbeatlike rhythms (the Malia/Boris Blank collaboration being a firm favourite).

Fortunately, the halls were of above average acoustic properties with solid walls and high ceilings. Even the regular hotel rooms had ceilings of about 2.6-2.7 metres height, which will have made the lives of the people demonstrating their wares there a little easier! Also, the brands/distributors who chose one of the smaller rooms for their presence, generally sized their equipment accordingly. The overall standard seemed to be pretty high: there were few if any real horrors of standing waves bouncing across the walls ad infinitum, reflective surfaces taking over the show or dipoles standing free-range in an open lobby producing no bass at all to be reported of.

Canton concentrated on its larger floorstanders, with a triple stack of them being driven by AVM electronics. The turntable on top of the rack of the same brand sadly seemed to be mostly an ornament. A large banner running along the  long wall  opposite the entrance introduced the own-brand smart multiroom system equipment, which was not on demonstration.

MBL showed a couple of complete systems featuring their ´Radialstrahler´ loudspeakers at different price points, the largest of which was on demonstration in a room decorated with plants throughout, which would not only have made it friendlier from a visual perspective but undoubtedly helped the acoustics a bit, too. I did feel the speakers had a tiny bit of a ´lisp´ while I was there, though, and also there was a bit of the ´Bose´ effect going on, in that the sound was spread all across with no real ´sweet spot´ as such but losing a bit of immediacy in the process. Still rather respectable as a sonic event if you dig (or don´t mind) the aesthetics, though.

Distributor Hörzone specialises in room acoustics and audio equipment that generally takes from the pro-audio sector and translates that to peoples´ living rooms. It used the show to present the renowned Dutch outfit Grimm Audio to the public in South Germany, with a system built around the LS1be integrated D/A converter/amp/speakers, which Matthias Böde (Editor-in-Chief of Stereo, one of three major German audio magazines) used to great effect to demonstrate the differences between MP3, 44,1 Khz/16-bit and 196 KHz/24-bit versions of the same recording. It was one of several Stereo workshops held by Böde throughout the day in different rooms.

The big Voxativ 9.88 modular speakers (separate enclosures for the wideband main speaker, midbass and sub-bass, 75.000 euro per pair) were driven by the big and visually interesting T805 single ended integrated amp  displayed star quality at Stuttgart: all the tonal and temporal coherence and agility of the Pi monitors that form the top section, coupled with the growl, body and slam of the largest conventional high end speaker towers. (Ed – we loved these at Munich)

The Germans do like their horns – Acapella, Avantgarde and Cessaro might be leading and worldwide renowned exponents of the genre, but these three-way floorstanders from Hornfabrik Eder with wooden midrange and high frequency horns and partnered with Cayin valve amplifiers, also displayed the compelling immediacy typical of the breed.

Helmut Biermann is the passionate ´maker´ behind the Levar product line, consisting of high end turntables and tonearms, record cleaners and the rather wonderful Resonance Magnetic Absorbers, distributed by MHW and sold directly from four Live Act Audio Studios in Germany. His opinion of the show is entirely positive: “On Saturday my stand was a full house here pretty much all along; it´s a bit more quiet now on Sunday but still good.“

Jan Sieveking of Sieveking Sound gets the Best Music of the Day Award from yours truly. I entered the room because of Nirvana´s Nevermind playing on the TW Acustic GT2 turntable (rest of the system: DS Audio E1 optical cartridge with its own phono preamp, Octave RE 320 preamp, HP 300 SE power amp and Super Black Box, Verity Audio Otello speakers, Cardas cables throughout and Quadraspire rack) and when I mentioned to Sieveking that this was the best music I heard so far, the man said ´oh, but I have something better still…´ Yes, that´s a vinyl copy of Faithless´ Reverence´ standing in front of the rack and before I knew, Insomnia was blasting at ´party!´ sound pressure levels. What a hero, someone bring out the glowsticks…

The system was quite obviously enjoying it too, and made the most of the modest room – a perfect example of a right-sized, well balanced system that one can well imagine parting with real money for. The Beatles´ Abbey Road in the remixed, remastered version sounded excellent, too: clear, detailed but also wholesome and involving. A honourable mention in the music stakes, however, must go to…

…Bernd Hömke of  Input Audio for the obscure, but very entertaining African instrumental dub followed by ´Jimi Hendrix live at the Miami Pop Festival´. The beer wasn´t half bad either.

As per usual at Input Audio, the front end of the system consisted of their own version of a Michell turntable called ´Transformer´ (the basic configuration is called ´Starter´, this time equipped with a Michell Tecnoarm and Michells ´largest´ MC , the Cusis M, while Harbeth speakers were at the business end. In between were Manley´s Chinook phonostage and Stingray integrated amplifier. A Creek CD player rounded off the ensemble. Another well balanced and well set up system that I can imagine sitting in real people´s homes.

How to make a small room seem BIG: the dimunitive Boenicke Audio W5 speakers keep surprising with their unreal size/sound ratio. Driven by Soul Note and a rather intriguing (and expensive) transformer volume control based preamplifier that has been on Boenicke´s website for over a year but somehow has passed me by completely. One shelf below a smaller, more affordable version in black. All under the watchful eye of Sven Boenicke himself (well, Switzerland is not a long way down from here so why not…).

Another of the small hotel rooms on the first floor was occupied by Munich outfit Klangloft, who displayed the rather exotic Aries Cerat electronics that are part of their distribution portfolio on their own shipping crates and used a quartet of wooden diffusion units in conjunction with the blue curtains of the hotel room and clever lighting to create a cosy atmosphere.  Taking turns (which must be taken literally in this case as there wasn´t enough room for both to be on display simultaneously) were some Cube Audio floorstanding widebanders from Poland and Grandinote Mach 2s – both made beautiful sounds.

If you like some Wilson speakers but find them a bit too ´serious´ – how about this bright yellow pair?

Last stop of the Stuttgart tour was the room of Aavik/Ansuz Acoustics (both brands belong to the same Danish company). Here, a pair of modestly sized (but not modestly priced) standmounts was playing a BIG room on the business and of a rackful of expensive looking black boxes with large LED graphics and delivering a far bigger and more complete performance than one would have given it credit for based on appearance. In his last workshop appearance of the show, Matthias Böde demonstrated -among others – the difference that a set of resonance control footers made when taken away (and subsequently put back) from under a power supply(!) in the system – well they should, given they cost 3,000 euro apiece, meaning there were 12,000 euro worth of them under the power supply unit alone…

Words and pictures by Eric van Spelde

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