Art Dudley

Since Herb Reichert and I were booked to fly back to New York on Sunday, Saturday was to be my last day at High End 2018—which is to say, Saturday was my Sunday: a day of moving along smartly, covering as many rooms and booths as possible, and listening only briefly.

Wouldn't you know it that my first stop of the day, at the room sponsored by German loudspeaker manufacturer Zellaton, was one that discouraged drive-by reporting…

Reminders were everywhere that the High End show, which takes place in a 30,000-square-meter convention center, differs from the hotel-centric North American norm in its preponderance of silent displays—silent, but seldom inconspicuous. A fine example was the room occupied by the 33.3-year-old Danish firm Gryphon Audio Designs, which used the occasion to display their 93.5"-tall, 2002-lb (net weight), twin-tower Kodo loudspeaker system (price on request). The Kodo—which, when I visited, enjoyed tremendous popularity as a selfie prop—is a four-way design, specified as reaching from 16Hz to 25kHz.

Friday's weather was no less spectacular than Thursday's—yet from the moment I arrived there, the MOC was mobbed with attendees who weren't at all bashful about spending the day indoors. Perhaps the interior sunniness of the glass-and-steel structure helped: I would certainly chafe at spending such a beautiful day roaming the dark halls of some glum hotel.

Whatever the reason, I couldn't shake the impression that a lot of audio enthusiasts didn't show up for work on Friday.

Everything you've heard is true. Lufthansa really is among the world's finest airlines. (I say that as an uncomfortable and often unwilling traveler who has had nothing but perfect flights on Lufthansa), Munich is one of the cleanest, most attractive, and most easily traveled cities in Europe. And Munich High End is, without a doubt and by a stunning margin, the greatest audio show on Earth, period. Nothing I could say—nothing—can prepare you for the sheer scale of the venue, the number and variety of exhibits, the quality of those exhibits, and the exciting, carnival-like vibe of Munich High End: It must be experienced.

Herb and Jana were visiting me in Albany, NY, at the 1936 semi-mock-Tudor house I now call home. The real star of this video is my dog, Chatter Dudley, an 8-year-old Jack Russell Terrier with a fierce fondness for Herb Reichert (they had met once before), and who had Jana Dagdagan saying, by the end of the day, "I wish I had a dog." Unfortunately, the cameras weren't running when Chatter took a running leap to sit next to Herb while he was on the couch, listening to the blue-vinyl version of Puente Celeste's Nama.

On at least one occasion that I can recall—in 1996, in the early days of Listener magazine—a US publicist for the Japanese manufacturing company Denon told me that they planned to discontinue their DL-103 moving-coil phono cartridge, an enduringly popular model that had been in production since 1962 (footnote 1). At the time, neither the DL-103 nor any of their other cartridge models appeared on Denon's US price lists, and neither English-language promotional materials nor even a basic spec sheet was available to American consumers or press.

Quebec-based Solen—which distributes parts from a number of different manufacturers, as well as manufacturing their own well-regarded capacitors and other components—has a talent for filling their exhibit rooms with scores of items, including finished products made from the parts they sell. Among the latter at this year's Montreal show was a single-ended triode amp that will soon be available as the Coffin Audio 2A3 SE. Using new-old stock 6SL7 tubes to drive its nominal 2A3 directly heated output tubes, the nicely made Coffin amp uses Solen Teflon coupling caps, and the stereo amp's retail price is estimate to be $CAD6000.