Like any other bloke and blokine not attending Munich's HighEnd show, I canvassed sundry online reports as they began to hit. The following photos are from Helmut Baumgartner's excellent very quickly published photo coverage on HifiStatement.net which you really ought to visit for the uncut effect. My focus was on which of the exhibits Helmut managed to cover had the cojones to add subwoofers to their active displays. For home theatre, subs are virtually de rigueur but often abused. For music they still remain underappreciated. In alphabetical order here are 11 rooms which clearly thought otherwise.
As previewed in my pre-show report, Børresen just joined the RiPol ranks of Bastanis, Ecobox, Cygnus, ModalAkustik, sound|kaos, Treble Clef and Voxativ by bowing folded open-baffle subs based on the expired Axel Ridthaler patent.
ESD showed these three-way hornspeakers with a woofer tower which must be an intrinsic part of the speaker given that the horns aren't large enough to cover the full bandwidth. So whilst these are (sub)woofers, they don't really apply to this list. Nice try though.
Estelon brought their new monitors and matching sub set up in 2.1 stereo guise.
Ø Audio of Norway combined their two-way hornspeakers with what to these eyes look like enormously voluminous RiPol subs called Varg that run a quad of 15" woofers each. Wicked woofage!
Perlisten nearly upped the enormity factor but apparently their line-source subs can also build into a wall. That naturally reduces their cabinet depth to instead compensate for in height. I believe there are four woofer pairs per side in a force-cancelling array.
Stenheim made my running point. In a normal home or flat, would you rather look at four small boxes; or two enormous speakers which equal three rather bigger boxes stacked, each? These subwoofers exploit the isobaric principle so run two 10" woofers one behind the other.
Voxativ went their signature RiPol route with dual opposing and single-woofer versions.
Wilson Benesch had two systems with their radical upfiring subwoofer/s set up.
Wilson dared this 2.2 setup. But why place the subwoofers behind the speakers rather than equidistant with the listeners for better time alignment? Wilson went for seconds with their massive WAMM Master Chronosonic system advertised as eclipsing €3'000'000. That ran two Thor's Hammer subs again the faux front 'wall' so well behind the main speakers again.
Is YG Acoustic's mondo sub an optional add-on or simply externalized bass system of the already big speaker? As with ESD, merely looking at very pretty pictures won't tell us. It's precisely why HifiStatement.net offer descriptive comments once shows conclude. Helmut's 528-strong photo safari merely serves as appetizer; and most successfully so. Now we get to my question for today.
Have subwoofers for music arrived in the ultra high end? Given this obviously spotty evidence—a massive if lesser photo album on another site adds the ATC exhibit to my shortlist—they're on a trickle charger. We're beginning to see a few gutsy pioneers break the mould but overall it's still early days for the concept to gain proper respect and traction. But we all got to start somewhere. I'd say on this subject we're finally on the way. Slowly does it?
Screen captures from sound|kaos FaceBook video.
PS: Another show report made mention of Storgaard & Vestkov's exhibit of their new Menja model which combines a passive floorstander with a large active woofer tower. The former is a ported 3-way with four 7-inch woofers of its own crossing in at 450Hz. The latter is a 900-watt bass system with three sealed and three rear-vented 7" drivers each crossing in at 100Hz. And Avantgarde Acoustics showed their new rectangular TwinSub bracketing the Trio as an alternative to the far larger BassHorn. Twin-tower statement speakers certainly aren't new Arnie Nudell made them, Mårten and Gryphon for just two still do. We might call them guaranteed stereo 2.2 solutions in that ideal integration of the active bass systems is engineered in and always in true stereo all the way into the infrasonics? Not living palatially, I'm personally wedded to Stenheim's scheme of combining a compact stand mount with one or two active compact subs. That's also what TotalDAC did by adding to their floorstander—in my home I'd go for a monitor but Vincent O'Brien doesn't make one—a single subwoofer stage right. Ditto a smaller ATC system which placed its large sub to the inside of its left monitor. At the Marriot Hotel sound|kaos alternated between their new Vox5 with built-in twin 12" dipole bass system and the Vox3 monitor with standalone 12" RiPol sub. From the reports I saw, those were the active subwoofer sightings of Munich.
