Can you beat my rack stack? "Not likely", we would admit. Nomos mean to facilitate the pure joy of playing music at a fair price. They restore vintage audio gear and at this event demonstrated their restorative power by playing some revitalized equipment.



An Akai GX-747 fed a Luxman CL preamp which in turn fed the active Klein & Hummel OX studio monitors. These speakers run ElectroVoice Alnico drivers and EL500-based power amps, all made in the early '60s.  The sound here made one wonder just what we have really developed over the past 50 years. Have we made any real progress?

From that high we went to another low. The next room did not show any particular interest in or regard for visitors, just two pairs of Pylon speakers called Diamond 25 and Diamond 28. With a little more effort, these affordable Polish products could have been presented so much better.

Radion are a Polish brand who presented a full line of their products. They take a Philips CD-PRO2 as basis for their CD transport and combined this with a balanced preamplifier with integral DAC to feed the 400-watt monos into 3-way modular loudspeakers. This was all the intel we managed to scare up on Radion Audio.

Graham Audio's BBC LS5/8 monitor was playing with Naim amplification whilst the smaller BBC LS 5/9 sat by awaiting their turn. These loudspeaker do something special and one aspect must surely be their non-fatiguing presentation. One can listen for hours without tiring.

Another fun room just as it had been two years ago was the ASC Pentoda space. The two men behind this company want to bring back the fun of the 70s when they had worked in the professional audio sector. Sitting on the floor and playing CD or DVD one after the other from vintage but buffed-up equipment made everyone here happy. Communication was via hands and feet which merely added to all the fun. This year their loudspeakers had American Beyman drivers and a Russian Alphard subwoofer—now that was friendly international cooperation!—with a different treble horn. The construction still looked DIY but the sound was really enjoyable and vibrant. We loved spending some time here.

Polish/German Taga Harmony presented their Diamond loudspeakers in a setup with Taga HTA2000B tube hybrid 100wpc integrated and DAC. In the picture we also see a THDA-500T three-in-one headphone/preamp/DAC on top of the big integrated.

Infado Boson are a Polish manufacturer with fully active speaker solutions. Theirs accept digital inputs from any source via USB, S/PDIF or wireless. The signal first hits a jitter killer stage called Direct Digital Synthesis before DSP adjusts the accompanying software for room correction. Finally the processed and now analog signal is fed to four built-in class D amplifiers of which two are dedicated to the woofer section. The PWM amplifiers are claimed to work at true 16-bit resolution. Infado Boson setups operate in master-slave configurations where the connection between left and right speaker can be wired or wireless. This particular all-in-one concept was not only technically interesting, what we heard from their short demo was equally promising.

Audio-GD are a Chinese manufacturer who shared space with Yaqin.

Primare gear from their 60 Series and Audiovector SR3 Avantgarde speakers formed the base for the sound in the next space. The Scandinavian duo was complemented by an Austrian Pro-Ject as analog source. This was another decent sounding room where the volume was set just right.

Audio Academy are another Polish loudspeaker manufacturer who this year presented their new Rhea model. ScanSpeak contributed twin 18cm mid/woofers, Seas a 27mm dome tweeter for this bass-reflex design.

Back to the golden olden days of audio it was with Retro Audio. This company's main business is restoring equipment from the 70s and 80s back to its original glory. Marantz, Luxman, Sansui, Rotel, Kenwood - all these names and the sheer good looks of amps and tape decks hit our nostalgia buttons hard.