Usher from Taiwan combines high value with superior workmanship and performance.

U-Vola wants you to hang with their speakers.

Verity Audio speakers are always dressed to the Nines and voiced to be truly civilized.

Vienna Acoustics was very clever to incorporate that tiny Japanese piezo super tweeter into their Klimt Series flagship.

Violectric by Lake People makes high-end headphone amplifiers. The HPA V200 sports electronically balanced inputs, unbalanced inputs with priority, a USB 1.1 16-bit 48kKz input, switchable DC-coupled amplifiers, switchable pre gain in 5 steps, an Alps RK27 pot and relay-controlled outputs for switch-on delay.

Vitus now comes in a variety of designer colors.

Vivid Audio from South Africa had its German premiere and ran Luxman amplifiers for real power.

Von Schweikert showed a new Unifield model. After his attempt at Internet-direct distribution via the short-lived VSpeaker site, he seems recommitted to storefront dealers.

Wadax showed the Speak1, a uniquely "twisted" design that is fully active with 3.2GB/second real-time processing using a custom-developed computer chip. After 20 years of research, this is the 10th implementation of the speaker and its present digital input socketry includes S/PDIF, BNC, Toslink and USB. The finish is Spanish Walnut


Yamamoto introduced their new A-06-3 which runs the current Emission Labs version of this legendary 4V triode with two C3m drivers and one AZ4 rectifier for 4 watts of output power. "I probably regard this amplifier as sounding the best in our line. We will start accepting orders next month."

Actually, Shikegi Yamamoto wasn't at the show but his e-mail arrived just when I'd gotten to this segment of the report to suggest unavoidable synchronicity. And seeing I made one exception, I might as well make another - for Don Garber of Fi who announced new products by e-mail just a day prior. Small manufacturers like these cannot afford attendance at Munich or any other big international trade fairs. "It's not without some pride that I recall Harvey Rosenberg saying that I had "the sales charisma of a wet paper bag". So here are some photos of two new preamps with no glowing descriptives. The first is of a one-piece unit that is the final evolution (the guy who got the first one called it "Darwin" after mumbling something about "intelligent design") of the preamp that Art Dudley reviewed in the Spring 1997 Listener. Everything about it is evolved and refined from that but the real difference is that it's dead quiet (something the first one wasn't quite). This one has a MM phono stage in the full function version - there's also a slightly smaller linestage only. The second is the all new one with separate all-tube regulated power supply. It's going to be available in three versions, a linestage only, a full-function with MM (shown here) and a full-function with switchable MM/MC phono. The MC phono will incorporate a custom step-up transformer not shown in these pictures. There has been a lot of enthusiasm, deservedly so, for the Shindo preamps. They're good but some comparisons might be interesting." Someone take the man up on his challenge.

Which gets us to zzzz if you've fallen asleep by now or a big Z for Zu Audio and the end of our report. Due to the Himmelfahrts holiday on show Thursday (Ascension to us Englishers), Zu's new Experience model never made delivery on the show floor. Adam Decaria who stopped by in Chardonne before to hear his Essence and do some mountaineering showed me a photo of it. It is a truncated pyramid with a 12" down-firing new 'monster' woofer and the firm's trademark widebander/tweeter array on the front, the latter with a Raal unit unlike the TangBand in the Essence below. At $17,000/pr, this new Zu faces some very stiff competition in the market. By way of Franck Tchang's Tango R, I demonstrated to Adam what my Essenc review had said - that a small midrange driver still has the advantage over their big 10-incher. He seemed quite confident however that the Experience will be a contender.

From Renate Paxa's own show statistics, Marja & Henk crafted the following conclusions and questions:
  • Number of exhibitors upped by 7.4% over last year but no increase in floor space: room sharing is the new way to go = more smaller manufacturers.
  • Number of journalists upped by 7.6%: anybody can be a journalist or, there are more publications - we missed seeing quite some journalists we saw in the past.
  • Number of traders on Thursday went up by 378. Assuming they revisited on Friday, this means there was a (5284 – 378) increase or still 13.8%.
  • Saturday attendance must have been influenced by the football match that afternoon. Does this mean 30% of German audiophiles are really more footie-philes?
  • Sunday's figures are irrelevant.
  • The most significant conclusion is the rise in trade visitors. Were they seeking market share or gear to move? Now that's the real question!

I hope you found the many embedded links in this report useful to revisit certain websites you hadn't been to in a long time; and to log onto others you'd never been to before. If the latter was just one new discovery, this article would have served its intended purpose. Marja & Henk have some commentary and many more pictures of their own which will publish in Part 2. For today, it's enough - though there was more. I know I missed quite a lot. It's one big show after all. It's very well organized -- hey, we're in Germany here -- and by gathering everybody under one roof (except for the outboarding renegades), this event is far more negotiable than what CES in Las Vegas has degenerated into. It's far from affordable to attend here but sharing a room two or three or more ways diminishes the pain. Here are some last-minute observations (or ill-disguised requests) from the pesky press desk:
  • CD/ROMs with 300dpi photos and product literature are far more portable and useful to journalists than being turned into bag ladies and men with printed goods.
  • Dark rooms are cozy for listening but hard to do photographic justice to.
  • New products that are not shown on their respective websites immediately after the show do not benefit from timely web reports that send interested parties to them via specific mentions.
  • Manufacturers whose websites can't be found with a Google or Yahoo search like Ank Audio do themselves a huge disservice.
  • Manufacturers who show the same ultra-expensive stuff on active display as they did last year (Avantgarde Acoustic comes to mind) do themselves a disservice by not allowing showgoers to sample their more affordable models which particularly in this economy would really be the sensible way to go.