Munich High End 2014
The Munich High End 2014 took place from May 15th - 18th 2014 in the M.O.C. and attracted nearly
18.000 visitors during these four days and thus meant a new record attendance. Munich has become
the most professional industry show in the world now and 450 brands have been present. Sieveking
Sound has been exhibiting ever since the show moved to Munich and this year we were able to get
one of the larger Atrium rooms with 73 sqm size. Unfortunately the rooms as such don’t sound allthat good as they have got a glass front and back, plywood sides and a huge acoustic ceiling with a lotof damping that is actually hanging about 70cm below the floor of the next level. Thus most rooms
only manage mediocre sound quality even though they use good quality gear.
We on the other hand managed to get great sound thanks to extensive usage of Harmonix. We
brought a complete Reimyo System including the ALS-777 Limited with Schuko Plugs and used thenew Million Maestro Powercords for the CAT-777 MK2 and KAP777. Everything was located onHarmonix RSB-1 bases and TU-666 Million feet. Cabling was Golden Performance interconnects andExquisite loudspeaker cables. This way we had wonderful electronics to start out with.
The new Encore Speakers from Combak Corporation had only
become ready days before the Munich show and played in asecond system with an Aura Note Version 2 and made wonderfulmusic. Absolutely smooth and grain free. We actually had asmall TV interview with Stereo Magazine regarding the newspeaker design and if you speak any Germany please enjoy the video. We had spoken to Verity Audioin Canada and our English distribution colleague Stephen who also is the Combak distributor in theUK was so kind as to allow us to use one of his Sarastro IIS speakers. We used the Harmonix MaxJumper and a total of four sets of RFA-7800 on the speaker to good effect.
We used three complete sets of RFA-7800 on
the walls and the ceiling of the room to allow
the system to offer a much wider and higher
soundstage with more natural decay in themassively damped room. While most rooms
gave the feeling that the soundstage did nothave any height and the system sounded
completely closed in our room received theReMusic award for the best sound of theentire show. Personally I still felt it would
have been nicer to be in a room with lessdamping
thatsounds more life
but the result was so good that we have had many customers who
returned several times during the show just to listen to some music.
Among them were dealers from far away countries like Israel or Spain who
simply stated that in this room we were making beautiful music.
As we are talking about music I should mention that we played a wide
variety of music and I very much liked to play visitor requests as I alwaysget to know new music this way. Our own musical selection included thenew Kevyn Lettau remaster on Master Music and also Blues, Jazz andTango! You won’t believe how wonderful a good Tango recording cansound on a Reimyo system. Interestingly enough during the entire fourdays there was only a single request to play classical music. It seems
Germany is really a country for Rock and Blues and even after all theseyears the simplest way to fill the room is playing
some Blues at high level.
As you can see on the photo we used floating
candles in low cut glass bowls with real roses
before the system and this had the hoped effect.
Nobody stood in front of the speakers or eventouched the system during the four days of theshow. So we had some intimate candle light andwonderful sound.
I have included some smaller pictures to get you
a better idea and hope to see as many visitors at
the next Munich High End.
Jan Sieveking