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Aphrodite's Vision had a plethora of Nagra kit in attendance, including one of the fabulous and famous miniature SNTS-R open-reel tape decks. Nagra's bristly MSAs set to mono held their own against the big 845 push/pull VPA tube towers as an A/B comparison over Verity's big Lohengrin II made abundantly clear.
This Swiss company whose employees work on military gear one month, audio the next—there's a total of 30 workers dedicated to the hifi division—clearly has a very strong vision of what they mean their gear to sound like. And they manage to capture that sound regardless of output devices.
From what I could glean, the new push/pull 300B amplifier will be very special indeed and given that I now live in Switzerland, a factory tour of Nagra—one with Soulution is already committed to—seems overdue. We'll see how Matthieu Latour at Nagra feels about that.
Octave from Germany once again proved that tubes and 'real' speakers can coexist just fine, showing here with Mårten Design I believe (even though identifying brands using Accuton ceramic drive units on sight becomes harder with each passing year as adopters multiply rapidly). Octave's big Jubilee monos were sighted repeatedly at previous shows but it's not often that one gets to actually hear them. Again, the Athens exhibitor here went the extra mile. While I'm generally not fond of the 'ceramic sound', Octave's valves made all the difference.
No hifi show these days could fail to include wireless and streaming audio and Olive from Silicon Valley represented this inevitable trend.
Opera Loudspeakers from Italy, not to be confused with Opera Audio from China.
Peak Consult showed their Princess in Walnut and a special El Diablo SE in acrylic.
PMC brought some of their bigger 'uns. As reader George Striftos alerted me to after publishing this report, the amplifier—which I'd failed to identify—was the model Alto from German brand
bonnec audiosystems.
