For the Musica Ambiente room, darTZeel had brought their new 9-input configurable CTH-8550 integrated amplifier - finally in black rather than their trademark (and to this punter super gaudy nouveau-rich) anodized gold. Daniel Müller from Wavecontrol contributed his Cheetah stand-mount with Mundorf ribbon and Accuton mid/woofer. Burmester and AVM filled the gaps.

The business end of the darTZeel includes USB ports for firmware updates.

Of course gold remains available if that's your favored dress code.

Recording studio professionals from Jecklin, Tacet and msm studios collaborated with Manger and Onkyo on a music surround demo in the final room. Jürg Jecklin—you might recognize his name from the Jecklin Float headphones—kicked off his presentation by saying that the common ambition to transport the sound of the live venue into the living room is intrinsically flawed. "No matter where you sit in a concert hall, the sound is terrible." Hmm. The reason why I go to concerts isn't sound. It's the music. Likewise, why I eat out is food, not ambience. Great ambience is extra. If the food be bad, I'd never return no matter how posh or comfy the digs. And to me, great sound is like restaurant ambience. It's lovely when present but far from vital to my enjoyment if the music is good. If not, good sound is a sad booby prize - one that's seemingly often treasured if this type of event is anything to go by.

Except for the setup between Weiss and Klangwerk, I didn't see much contemporary hipness which graffiti artists and their audience could easily relate to. Gazing through the centers of vintage short-play records is too limited a perspective and hip only to geezers. Vinyl and valves will be with us for quite a while longer. Great. But that's certainly rather niche. And who'd want five matched speakers in their living rooms to listen to a very limited repertoire of 2L or similar albums in surround sound? Not I. Am I missing something? Markus in fact had wanted to organize Klangschloss 2010 around modern audio solutions. Alas, their purveyors apparently weren't yet ready to sign up and participate. Except for his own exhibit then, this year's installment continued to ply the past and deal out the status quo.

My fully loaded 160GB iPod in the jacket pocket thus saw no other duty than plug into the old Subaru's radio on the way coming and going. Too bad. A little Wadia iDock or Peachtree Audio iDecco would have so conveniently attached to any of the Klangschloss systems for a bit of bridge building and instant gratification. Perhaps next year. With a final glance at the castle from the lake front, this concludes our little coverage of this event. Like the cuppa java with the baby horn, Klangschloss Greifensee is all about Gemütlichkeit. That deutschlinger word is hard to translate, exactly. But it includes comfort, coziness and a generally down-tempo homey vibe. All of that was in evidence here to make the event the polar opposite of the sensory overload commercials that are the big audio trade shows in the big bad cities...