Audiopassion is a Swiss brand with a Bern showroom I'd not encountered before. Their electronics combine valves in the preamp with class D modules in the power amps. Their 5-driver 3-way Gioia loudspeakers are built up of solid tone wood while the Audiopassion turntable is available in Verde Guatemala marble or Bergahorn wood and fitted with Kleintechnik motors. Amplification components, turntables and speakers all from the same house made for an unexpectedly ambitious showing and only the Ayon Audio CD player, Vovox cabling, Bassocontinuo rack and Graham Slee phonostage were sourced from elsewhere. Did someone forget to tell Audiopassion that hifi was in the doldrums? With a name like that, it'd probably not have mattered.

The best room on the top floor was naturally taken up by show organizer Klangwerk. As last year, Markus Thomann shared with Weiss Engineering for a system on one end of the long room while Avantgarde Acoustics again took up the other end. Presentations rotated on the hour throughout the day. Being a proud new owner of a Weiss DAC2 leashed up to a 1TB iMac via Firewire 800 already loaded with 4000 songs in WAV and AIFF, I was keen to touch base with Daniel Weiss. The man was sadly at a funeral but still expected to make the planned 5:00 seminar on computer audio - by which time we'd long since departed. New from Klangwerk but still in prototype form was this new dual 10-inch class G-amplified subwoofer console. With its sidefiring slot-ported drivers, it's a clever bit of contemporary audio furniture. With the active Klangwerk speakers shown, it made for a deceptively simple ultra-modern full-range hifi. Add software room correction and valve emulation as Spatial Computer's Clayton Shaw embeds them in iTunes—I will review that software shortly—and this is the future as I see it at least.

System source was a Mac Mini running iTunes and Amarra as controlled from an HP monitor.

The new Weiss DAC202 with remote volume, polarity and input switching and headphone socket provided professional-quality D/A conversion and complete system control.

The business end of the new DAC adds BNC i/o sync ports and only seems to delete one Firewire socket compared to my DAC2. The second one now hides beneath the power IEC.

Here are the Weiss INT202 Firewire to AES/EBU D/D converter, the ATT2020 remote-controlled passive preamp and Daniel's Chiron-Glass1 glass fiber cable for AES-EBU feeds.

Meanwhile Avantgarde Acoustic Duo Omegas ran off the stable mate integrated amplifier with a Classé digital front end and analog table I forgot to identify.