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Orange was the new black. Let's take a short break from attempting any semblance of sonic or otherwise useful informational reportage. How about silly trend spotting? Enter the colour orange. We'd seen it already with Crystal Cable's new Minissimo monitor. 'twas promptly copied to Gabi's USB stick formed to look just like it. While we're at it, a word to the wise: handing out plain paper pamphlets or expensive full colour gloss-lacquered brochures to the press is so passé. It turns our aging lot into bag ladies and knuckle draggers. That's because such paper goods are sizeable and get heavy in a hurry. USB sticks are far more compact and hold hi-rez photos and more.


To document the new orange trend (colorization in general was a constant speaker theme), here are a few of its specimens. We start with Crystal Cable just for a reminder.


Here is Cessaro from Germany proposing the horns + tubes recipe.

Here is Estelon's €175'000 Extreme. Its curved wedge-shaped head assembly is motorized. Prompted by remote, it will travel up or down by up to 30cm in its channel to fix optimum alignment with listening distance and seating height. As we'll still see, Stenheim had a similarly motorized feature to control toe-in without physically moving their heavy speaker.


This shot of the Estelon room shows off the gargantuan size of Hans-Ole Vitus' latest flagship amplifier.

I'm not certain Kharma would tolerate our calling their finish a pedestrian orange—it probably goes by something far more fancy like persimmon—but a bit of a stretch is de rigueur for most audiophile theories.

How about these Polish horns?

Or Quadral's kit? That firm had actually run a consumer contest to vote on what first new colour they should add to the trim of their electronics beyond black and white. Blood orange had been the consensus. Which makes for the perfect spot to talk of filters - perception, not crossovers. All of us have 'em. Attending a very large show to limit one man's ability to take all of it in (unless one did mere drive-by shooting, i.e. in and out of a room in 15 seconds just to take a few photos), one must apply filters.


Those take various forms. In my case, I'm not really that interested in certain brands. They're so well covered by the mainstream already, there's nothing left for me to do or say. So I can give those a miss and read about them elsewhere. With others I might have had less than favourable experiences. To change my mind now requires a kick-arse demo. If there's poor sound, bad or no music playing (perhaps because the presenter was embroiled in a discussion or in the midst of an equipment change), I'm not really motivated to stick around. My clock is ticking. If stuff is obscenely expensive, robotically ugly or otherwise handicapped for the real world, the burden to convince me is thrice high on the exhibitor.


Bad experiences can extend beyond the equipment to include people. Be it lousy report cards from owners on reliability, denied repairs or other issues; be it poor conduct, lack of professionalism, broken promises or cheapskatism like not wanting to pay return shipping on review loaners to instead store them indefinitely with the reluctant writer... as humans, all of it acts as a constant filter. That's particularly so when time is of the essence. It requires that we be selective. Needless to say, some of it factors purely in the moment. Arriving at a demo minutes later or a day earlier might have generated a very different impression. That's all grist for this mill. It's blatantly obvious when you stop to think about it but still deserves a mention. If I didn't enter certain rooms, you can be sure that the reason for it was one of these personal filters. If I make no sonic comments, it could be because I didn't stick around long enough; or found the sound not up to par to bother.

I probably only covered 1/4th of the products in Munich though I did walk the entirety of the facilities more than once. I particularly gave the glut of headphones a complete miss since the folks from headfi.org concentrate on them and usually have multiple contributors covering these events. My focus for coverage was determined by my personal filters. Which now returns us to our regular programming.

For horny contraptions unlikely to convince the ladies of the house, Blumenhofer had the perfect solution.

Constellation Audio premiered their new Inspiration range which brings pricing to $10'000 for the stereo amp, $20'000/pr for the monos and $9'000 for the preamp.

German Physiks introduced new colors which now may be applied also to the top covers of their wideband bending-wave driver (the cover on my HRS-120 pair is still finished in pedestrian black Nextel).