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Another dimmer-than-dim-lit room, another company new to yours truly - Taylor Acoustic with massive wooden enclosures.

These electrostats from Techno Elmarx Srl are designed in Trento/Italy and assembled in Zarnesti/Transylvania. As their non-audio website shows, this firm is deeply into industrial engineering and the audio project between José De Salvador and Renzo De Pascale is a very recent venture which I believe will eventually be captured on their site. Finish options include automotive lacquer over MDF and real stone while the quite massive transformers can either be housed inside the trapezoid plinth or parked out of sight in which case the panels rest on metal braces as shown in the middle.



In my recent review of Triangle's Magellan Cello Sw2, I took photos of their proprietary drivers but naturally did not peel back the bonded diaphragm skins of the woofers. The lower photo here shows what I missed. Shooting with a 24mm wide-angle lens has advantages in crammed hotel rooms but one clear liability is bowing distortion, so evident here on the very tall Magellan Grand Concert.



This static display nicely showed off the innards of a Ulix valve amp.

Unison Research pays homage to both transistors and valves and Milan 09 belonged to the former in a system completed with Opera Loudspeakers. Valves were on static display by way of the S9 integrated which runs four Svetlana 572s for 30 watts of parallel single-ended power. Also static was a - server. Yes, I did find one. It uses a Teac 5010 transport, a Wolfson Micro WM8804 receiver, a Burr Brown SRC1492 sample-rate converter and Wolfson Micro WM8740 24-bit/96kHz DACs. 2 x ECC82 and 2 x ECC83 make up the class A tube output stage and for display duties, a 6.5" 640 x 480 pixel color VGA is standard. There's 1GB of DDR2 RAM and one TB of storage capacity. The CPU runs at 1.2GHz.





The way Vexo solved the vexing EU regulation to provide tube protection is both classy and simple to the extreme. A contoured sheet of tempered class slips into a recess and is lit with yellow diodes from beneath while the company name is etched into the glass. The amp shown is the model VXSE KT88/C. It runs 2 x 5814As to drive 2 x KT88s for 15-watt RMS power with 10dB of negative feedback.



If you thought I was kidding about extreme toe-ins, Vivid Audio would disabuse you in a hurry. They also continued the theme of very dark rooms which make for cozy womb-like listening divorced from the bright sunlight outside but turn life harsher for photographers without bounce flash.

The greatest bold-faced cheats of the show were the WLM folks who ran their puny Stello Monitors cut at 80Hz with the new Uno active subwoofer sitting unsuspecting on the left side, wedged as though static between two of the Stello floorstanders. The subwoofer is intended for WLM's Basic Series speaker models of the Stella, La Scala and Diva ranges. Retail price for a pair of Stella monitors plus Uno is a very friendly €3.480. As is show tradition here and in Munich and Warsaw, this system put to shame a lot of the high-priced spread and played ungawdly loud without any break-up or distress signals. Showgoers kept walking up to the mini speakers, looked at the WLM Acoustics EL34 Sonata valve integrated amplifier and mumbled incoherently. Plenty of head-shaking would accompany this ceremony.


Very long very cheap cables spliced thrice ran from the room's far right rear corner along the back wall along the left wall to behind the speakers. Source was a MacBook Mini with a €400 outboard DAC feeding a Red Wine Isabella preamp, volume controlled from the DAC.


The success of systems like these is not to be underestimated. So often audiophiles aspire to greatness with speakers that can't be accommodated properly by their rooms. A 3-piece solution of tiny monitors and a superior active sub properly blended then becomes the ticket to stardom. To filter the satellites without sonic penalties, WLM has introduced a passive Cut Box with minimal component count. Thus protected from infrasonics, die Pegel Festheit or SPL stability of this speaker with the big paper tweeter is truly shocking. Kudos to another well-implemented WLM demo. These gents know how to run a show such that people walk away impressed. And isn't that what every exhibitor hopes for?

Zu Audio failed that mark in an unexpected way. Their recent return to direct sales in the US makes the Essence speaker an unprecedented low $3,495/pr in the colonies while the price in Europe remains the already fair €5,000/pr it's been since the speaker first launched. This is a very unfortunate development for Zu's international distributors. They are losing customers who are outspokenly unwilling to be charged twice what the Yanks pay. Can you blame them? I'd not be surprised if this decision cost the company a lot of foreign business. Two Italian readers who communicated via e-mail about acquiring a pair backed out because of it. The Italian Zu importer confirmed this reaction on a larger scale from a dealer perspective. Art Dudley's October issue review in Stereophile notwithstanding, Zu might soon regret their most recent strategy. That'd be a shame. The Essence really is a very good speaker that deserves an audience outside US borders.

And this now concludes our coverage of the Milan Top Audio show 2009. Whenever I'm asked what the most important audio shows in Europe are, I always say that Munich is N°.1 while Milan and Warsaw share the N°.2 spot. Given this year's showing, I'd stick by that assessment.