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Whilst on clever names, Surrountec is likely to conjure up anything but a mostly pro-oriented speaker firm from the Schwabian Untergruppenbach. To break into the home hifi scene the company had rolled out their Meisterstücke (masterworks). Suzanne Vega’s acapella number "Tom’s Dinner" sounded extraordinary – highly organic, harmonically exceptionally rich and pure. Equally out of the ordinary were fit ‘n’ finish of this 150kg 160cm tall flagship. Piano lacquer whose application and curing consumes a solid three months; routed-from-solids aluminum parts including the driver baskets; Titanium screws; Accuton ceramic drivers including a diamond tweeter; gold hookup wiring; and hand-rolled silver coils and capacitors are just a few of the details that accompanied these bi-amped monsters. Extraordinary too was the sticker of €250.000, thankfully for the pair. Cough. But these Schwabians also work smaller. Their Professional range starts at €9.000. We’re quite keen on investigating this company further.

Fellow Schwabians Nubert cut out where Surrountec starts off. Even so the new nuPro models seemed unusually attractive on price even for Nubert. €470/570 respectively is what they want for the active boxes of nuPro A-10 and A-20. Both are powered by class D amplification and DSP technology and can be fed directly via USB. Marketing chef Roland Spiegler feels that the main differentiator isn’t so much price or performance (though the A-20 sounds a bit larger) but how much speaker one wants on the desk. The A-20 is 33cm tall, weighs 7.2kg per and is powered by 80wpc. The A-10 shrinks by 6cm, is 3.5kg lighter but still puts out 2 x 60 watts. The audition was surprising. Despite contrarious acoustic conditions of a well-attended open show booth we were at hello, particularly by the A-20’s very mature output. A pair is on its way to Berlin. There we’ll go far beyond the desk top to take the measure in our big systems.

Surprises were to be had also at the Thorsen Kölln and Ingo Hansen booth of Phonosophie where the motto could have been Ingo goes PC. Aside from classic Phonosophie electronics and Viennese Joseph Brodmann speakers we spied an Apple iBook with iTunes + Amarra and the brand-new Phonosophie DAC1 which should ship by year’s end for somewhere between €3.500 and €4.000. Inputs are deliberately limited to S/PDIF and USB to avoid contamination. USB runs 24/192 async and two toroidal power transformers separate analog and digital sections. We were quite taken by the prototype’s performance and look forward to a formal assessment.

To not unduly stress the little surprise word, certain visitors to Quadral still would have been. Whilst company addition Sascha Reckert hammed it up next to their updated heavyweight Titan in VIII iteration, the speaker firm from Hannover also snuck in their own range of electronics. There are two integrateds (€2.850 A5 and €2.000 A3) and two CDPs (€2.400 C5 and €1.800 C3) all with real-wood trim. The amps talk of studio-borrowed volume control solutions to optimize channel balance and get sealed gold-contact signal relays, discrete output stages and overbuilt power supplies with extreme line filtration. The A5 runs in dual mono and has XLR inputs. The spinners strut 24/192 BurrBrown chips, bi-FET op amps and broadband line filtering. The C5 adds a master clock generator and XLR outputs.

The line-filtration subject came up also with Connect Audio showing standalone power conditioners like the replacement for the Isol8 MiniSub 2, the  €899 MiniSub Wave. Retained are the six sockets, two for hungrier loads like power amps. Isol-8’s Simon Dart explained that those got more effective filters with series elements which the predecessor avoided but which in the value-priced MiniSub were implemented without dynamic losses. The four remaining sockets were upgraded to fully incorporate the company’s transmodal filter concept against common-mode and asymmetrical noise.

A €300 surcharge builds in DC suppression to eliminate transformer hum from core saturation. Hard to overlook in this exhibit were the tall €23.000/pr 129kg phase-optimized three-way bass reflex 4260 flagship towers from French Elipson (founded in France in 1938). They sport hand-built custom drivers and adaptable crossovers for better room matching. Connect Audio’s Michael Proske added that some of B&W’s speaker development was based on original Elipson patents.

Proud of patents too—here for class D amplification—was Korean Calyx who signed up German importation with Higoto’s Carsten Hicking and Torsten Imberg in Essen earlier in the year. The popular asynchronous data transfer mode makes inroads into price-conscious strata in the €1.100 Calyx CTI, a class D integrated with USB and three analog input said to be happy even into current-hungry reactive loads. More ambitious DAC shoppers have the Calyx DAC 24/192 with XLR outputs that's shaped like a MacMini.


We stopped for a quickie at Canada's PSB whose new €800/pt Imagine Mini is clad in real wood veneers. "Astonishingly large grounded transparent and mature sonic imagery" read the notes for a reminder that quality sound needn’t involve remortgaging the house or ruining domestic tranquility with monkey coffins (Germany’s importers Robert Ross and Klaus Stahl asked their charming hostess to join for a photo op.) The 14cm mid/woofer is powered by two magnets whose added drive fills out tonal substance despite demure box dimensions to have been designed without need for a sub (designer and company founder Paul Barton at right).

Sonus Faber’s The Sonus Faber with our The Jörg Dames for scale also was conceptualised sans sub (cough). Limited to 25 pairs globally, this €160.000/pr dream boat sports a massive top-to-bottom clamp built of CNC-machined nickel-plated ‘Avional’ cylinders (a super-dense aluminium alloy) plus exo skeleton for minimal enclosure resonance. More than 25 buyers may approach the new Guarneri Evolution, a similarly clamped €18.000/pr luxury affair in compact monitor guise incl. stands.
 
Famous for valve circuits, US stalwart ARC is committed to furthering the state of the art also in class D with its Definition range that parallels the tube models. Dry/cold-sounding class D isn’t on the menu import chef Mansour Mamaghani was quick to stress. Introduced last year at €6.000, the DSI 200 integrated and later DS450 power amp will be followed by a preamp and mono amps.


Digital raised its hand again with North-German Phonar. Its top Credo Reference (starting at €9.000/pr passive) can for a €2.000 surcharge be had semi active. A DSP module adapts bass to room response which includes calibration by the dealer or Phonar.


The factory includes 4 DSP presets to counter typical home scenarios. The same Phonar booth also showed the new €1.499 Music Hall 70.2 dual-mono integrated with MM phono, pre-out and 4/1 RCA/XLR inputs with Sanken power transistors for 180wpc into 8Ω.

To give analog equal coverage let’s look at Dr. Feickert’s €6.000 Blackbird whose particular gold scheme as per distributor Stefan Beckert of B&T was a custom commission for foreign markets which might also catch on domestically. Standard features are the adjustable arm board, an optional second board, twin-motor drive and POM platter with integral setup markings. The ca. €8.000 Firebird gets three motors, a more ambitious chassis construction and an aluminium platter with POM inlays.


To conclude, not only Feickert’s Blackbird was a colorful creature. HighEnd 2011 was very varied and multi-layered thanks also to many smaller international exotica which our report admittedly short-changed but then Srajan's notes already covered some of them. And, the 30th HighEnd surely wasn’t the last we’ll attend. There's always next year...