Munich High End 2010 - Day One
Munich, Germany: The first day of the High End Show is a trade day. Manufacturers trawl for new distributors, distributors look for new dealers, dealers hunt for new products and journos swoop for scoops. It's also not the best day for listening, as most systems were only unboxed a few hours earlier. A day or so of constant music playing will transform many mediocre-sounding systems, and this means in fairness to the potential sound quality of many systems, we'll limit the discussion to those systems that had already passed the good sound threshold. In discussing with the few manufacturers who hit their sweet-spot early, a common theme emerged - "We set up two days ago and spent the Wednesday fine-tuning".
Of that early first round of listening, three systems sounded outstanding. The first was from Emillé, and comprised a Cary CD player, a Dr Feikert Woodpecker turntable (vinyl is still king in Germany, and Dr F's turntables are a very popular choice among the cognoscenti) with an Ortofon E90 cartridge, Emillé Alure phono stage, Quintessence preamp and two sets of the new Rapture mono power amps into a pair of striking MSD speakers from South Korea. This system was the first to feature the new Zendo cables from Mundorf (the capacitor people). It sounded wonderfully smooth and insightful, especially when playing a slice of Nat King Cole.
French speaker experts Triangle were also making a very fine sound with their Magellan SW2 loudspeakers, all driven from a Luxman CD/SACD player, the excellent Octave tube line preamp and a Symphonic Line power amplifier. Eric Dubouays, Triangle's Export Manager, has arguably the best pair of ears in the business right now and is passionate about getting things right... well, he got things right here, as the sound was detailed and beguiling and a half hour spent listening to this system was a half hour too little.
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, the best of the best was the Magico Q5 loudspeaker system, this time driven by Spectral electronics, MIT's top cables and either an EMM Labs player or the company's own custom-built music server. It was good enough to make everything else on that first day sound like a series of footnotes to the Magico room, the Emillé and Triangle rooms notwithstanding. And yes, my camera's lens needs some work and doesn't like black backdrops!
The first day is not simply about presentations, as there's new toys everywhere. Some of these are still in the late stages of design, like the Arcam rDAC. This low cost (expected price around £300 for the basic model) digital converter comes as standard with dejittered S/PDIF and asynchronous USB inputs, and sports a top-of-the-range Wolfson WM8741 DAC, according to Arcam's founder, John Dawson. Everyone's got a DAC these days, but the rDAC's unique take on the digital converter is the optional wireless digital connection, using the new designed-for-audio Kleer standard. Requiring a dongle at the product end and a stubby aerial at the rDAC, this can connect to a system up to 50m away without signal degradation or dropout, and the whole package is intended to be a £100 option. As you can tell by the Pound signs, we don't have Dollar or Euro prices yet, but the product is expected to start shipping mid-year.
Another big launch at the show was the new Audio Research 40th Anniversary Reference preamplifier. This two box statement line preamplifier (one preamp, one power supply) is fully dual-mono, designed to push the boundaries of even the Reference series preamps and is only available for one year. I'll add some more detail on this exciting new product when I can extract more from the Audio Research team, all of whom were talking to an orderly line of people wanting to discuss the new limited-edition masterwork.
Other launches were more incremental, such as Naim Audio's upgraded HDX player, with new software and SSD drives in place of the conventional spinning hard disks. Although solid-state storage costs considerably more than normal HDD, the commonly-held opinion is that it sounds better, as well as being more reliable and silent. Naim also showed more products in its increasingly successful Uniti range of streaming products.
More to follow...
Comments
Dude - this isn't a porn site, so change your log-in name.
I assume the guy never even heard SSD compare to conventional HD and just prefer to be closed minded about things he/she has absolutely no idea about. I suggest the person should give it a listen before spewing out rude comments that does not contribute to anything much.
PS I have both SSD and conventional HD in my music server and yes, there is an audible difference.
The problem is that audiocard and HDD has the same power supply.
And HDD drive demands power not continuously but from time to time when it moves some parts inside to navigate HDD tracks and sectors.
This splashes of current influence the audio cards circuit and produce jitter. Easy explanation.
I have contacted some of those who claim SSD affects the sound quality of HD audio (and I'm really working on second-hand data here, as I have no SSD drives in any of my computers as yet - although there is one in the Embla I am testing, there's no way of easily extracting this and comparing it with a spinning HDD, so I would be unable to pin down what it's doing).
Those who support SSD tend to claim lower RF interference problems affecting the audio side of the system, rather than potential jitter issues, as the root of the reason why they make these claims. They also make the uncontentious claims of lower noise and reliability (no moving parts are generally quieter and more robust than moving parts). The RF interference claim might suggest an explanation for the criticism that the HDX undermines the performance of the whole system just by being inserted into that system (see Martin Colloms review of the HDX in Hi-Fi Critic in the UK). It is also perhaps why those who make USB DACs often recommend the PC not be on the same power strip as the rest of the system as a minimum plan. Again, viewed in the light of the USB DAC manufacturer, they stand to gain nothing from getting prospective owners of their products to jump through expensive hoops, apart from guiding them to a good sound quality. If anything, making such claims only serves to discourage potential buyers, who may dismiss such suggestions (as well as the company making the suggestions, and its products) as nonsense or go for a product that isn't as much trouble. And yet, those companies still make these claims.
Those who make these claims are universally from the media player side, whether using a PC or a dedicated music server directly in the system, by USB or FireWIre. Those who make network DACs and who serve music over TCP/IP lines never seem to make claims about the importance of SSD from a sound quality perspective. Which might again point to the possibility of RF ingress into the audio system - an ethernet connection is likely to isolate that RFI producing HDD thanks to a lot of intermediary steps in the chain.
As I said earlier, I am not a SSD user and not in the position to test this readily and easily. Presumably the best way of testing this would be to have two otherwise identical and cloned PCs, one with and one without SSD. Insert the first PC, listen... remove the first, insert the second, listen. Do this blind and repeat until conclusions are drawn. Those who claim to have done this seem to report that they can hear a difference.
I'm sorry if merely reporting such things causes so much distress to some. But, if these claims are made, they should be reported upon and not dismissed as impossible and stupid ideas; I'm mindful that if this were 40 years ago, we'd be chuckling at the impossible and stupid idea of someone viewing the internal architecture of the human body using a series of powerful magnets.
If you want to cross over from healthy skepticism to cynicism, my reporting of such things still provides a service, because it lets you know which companies you should avoid.
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com