Jason Victor Serinus

An hour after High End 2015 opened in Munich on Friday May 15, the stairways to the second floor were packed. Multiply this mob scene by 7, and you have an idea of how many consumers and dealers were eager to fill the corridors, halls, and rooms at the show.

One of the major entertainment attractions at High End 2015 was US jazz vocalist (jazz-sängerin) Lyn Stanley. Performing twice daily in the room of her sponsors, Purist Audio Design, Stanley sang live into a microphone to recorded accompaniment, and then invited people to compare the amplified results to the playback of the same track on her LP (using Purist cabling, of course).

Ready, set go. It may not look crowded at 9am on the first morning of High End 2015 in Munich, but we who were dashing in an hour early for the Devialet press conference soon found Atrium 4.1 (shown) filled with people. Attendees included, in addition to consumers, dealers from multiple continents, some of whom are now skipping January's CES in Las Vegas because they find the trip to Munich more productive and far more enjoyable. Also present were manufacturers and reps who prefer to make the rounds rather than display. All in all, it's fair to say that, for many in the industry, High 2015 is as much a trade show as it is a consumer showcase.

How do you measure success? Some show promoters count the number of lanyards they've given out and call those "attendance figures." According to Liz Miller, AXPONA/Audio Con Content and Marketing Director, “We sold 5137 tickets, an 18% increase over 2014."

After happily discovering that there were only three rooms to blog on floor 2, first up was the huge exhibit from one of the most dedicated dealers in the business, Doug White of The Voice That Is. Doug showcased a not-too-shabby system that included several premieres...

Using Vivid loudspeakers, Richard Rogers of Shunyata and Bruce Jacobs of Stillpoints conducted a very convincing demo in which they began with stock power cables and no room treatment. First, they switched from stock power cables to Shunyata's Venom digital power cable ($395) and Venom High Current power cable ($295). Next, they added Stillpoints Ultra 6 equipment supports under equipment where there had been no supports before.

Finally, they added at least six Stillpoints Aperture acoustic panels to the sidewalls and horribly reflective glass windows behind the speakers. Each change elicited more depth, air, believable timbres, midrange, bass, vibrancy and substantiality to the sound...

What, Jason, you're still on the 5th floor? How are you ever going to get all the way down to sub-Lobby Level, let alone be able to make some "Best of Show" calls, when you're only doing 18 rooms per day? Get a move on, Serinus! Such thoughts crossed my mind as Day One was drawing to a close, and I still had a few rooms left on the second of AXPONA's seven, not six, floors. But what is there to do but simply go with the flow, even if there's little flow left to go with at day's end?