Markus Duevel showed his new Sirius speaker in the Thomas Fast room, with mister chrome dome -- Thomas is one of those energetic and very sweet guys -- doing the DJ bit. He'd swap from the short-wall Acoustic System/AMR rig to the long-wall Duevel/Karan setup and even sneak in the futuristic Belgian Synthese speakers at times. It was all about maximizing exposure. Needless to say, his space was booby-trapped - erm, sugar-cubed and resonatored to the hilt.

Resonator inside? Not like with Franck's Tangos but the Sirius did show some lip.

D is for dutchie. And dutchies are cheap. Actually, Roland Breteler of Crafty isn't where the alphabet woulda put him but in my warped mind, his exhibit was the Dutchie's. Check out just how cheap it can get.


The hammer of this auction was the li'l EL84 integrated which raised memories of Sophia Electric's Baby. It sells here for all of € 299. Hot damn and vanilla. It's made by Yarland.

The matching KT88 unit is € 1K, still sweet but it's the above bugger that's got "run away with me" written all over it. Best budget tube find of Munich? You bet.

Time to return to C for Chario. While I snooped around here and admired the Walnut joinery, the sound was boring as hell. But none of the exhibitors sitting in their chairs seemed to notice so I took my pix and made trax.

Electronix were by Lector di Romagnoli C.A.

Crystal Cable showed with Siltech, McIntosh and MartinLogan. About the status of her speakers, Gabi admitted to challenges working the glass crystal enclosures. "We want it perfect so you guys in the press gotta be patient." Jawohl!


As mentioned in our news room, the show organizers "invited Gergely Bogányi who just completed recording all the Frédéric Chopin Nocturnes to double SACD for Stockfisch-Records. At the hifi show, the artist himself will be performing select piano concerts on the world's largest grand piano, the Italian Fazioli 308.


"Gergely Bogányi is Hungarian and belongs in the top league of young pianists. He began playing the piano at the age of four. He won his first musical award when he was six and three years later won first prize at the national piano competition in Nyíregyháza, Hungary. He won awards at festivals in the former Czechoslovakia, at Epinal in France, Ettlingen in Germany as well as the Helmi-Vesa at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Bogányi received first prize at the Chopin piano festival at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy in Budapest."
A former concert pianist herself, Gabi felt for Gergely who felt displaced having to play Chopin
while people were playing all manner of other things at the same time. The brass quintet probably had no such compunctions. Their sound carried far and wide to dominate.

The guys below kicked out some rocking jams at the entrance of Hall 3.

There was more brass to go around, too.

And while D is for Do Me, we now go to EAT. This doesn't stand for girl eat dog even though Euro Audio Team's Jozefina Krahulcova would eat some of her competition if she could. Behind the scenes, there's bad blood in the most unexpected places. Reviewers like yours truly manage just fine stepping right into it. I had proposed to Jozefina, earlier and via e-mail, to do a 300B comparison. It took quite some convincing in Munich to assure her of the sanity of the proposition but she finally said yes. Halleluya.

The Greeks at TruLife Audio, when asked what 300Bs they favored, replied "TJ carbon graphite plates". A reader, knowing of my planned tube party, instructed me sternly not to overlook the Sophia Electrics - which happen to be TJs. Which now makes two informed votes for them. Trafomatic likes JJ. Yamamoto likes Emission Labs. It's all about flavors, tastes and optimum matching with your electronics. That's why it's doubly disappointing to hear that Eunice Kron is going out of the valve business. You see, she henceforth wants to sell her tubes only to those owning her amplifiers. I had hoped to live it up with EAT, EML, JJ, KR, Shuguang, TJ and WE bottles. But Jozefina wasn't interested in being compared to KR. Now she won't have to. C'est la vie. Or synchronicity.

The Emillé story is highly unusual. Parent company Kwangwoo Electronics makes industrial display parts for Samsung. For fun, they've built tube amps for the last 15 years but only started selling two years ago. Introducing myself to vice present Don W. Jo, he introduced me to his international sales and marketing manager Vital Gbezo instead [below].

Vital doesn't just look like African royalty, there appears to be bona fide royalty in his family's ancestry. Vital's background? He's been Nina Simone's publicist for a long time. How he ended up at Emilllé and what his plans are going forward are just some of the interesting aspects of this story waiting to be told. If Mister Gbezo's due diligence on 6moons checks out, we might have more on this in the future when Emillé's expanding distribution makes it sensible.

There are some euro importers set up already so we could be looking at later in the year.