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August 2009
Ever Been To A Hi-Fi Show?
Editorial By David Price
Ever been to a hi-fi show? They're quite an experience, don't you know! With hundreds of manufacturers under one roof, there's so much to see, and to hear, too...
For me, one of the particular highlights of a specialist show is the chance to ‘meet your maker'. Well not literally, unless you decide to go poking around underneath a particularly large valve amplifier, or manage to impale yourself on an unusually pointy speaker spike. No, by this I mean you can talk to many of the characters in the international audio industry. You'll regularly see the supremos of companies such as Roksan, Funk Firm, Avid, van den Hul, Absolute Sounds, Townshend, Naim and Sugden for example, plus a great many others, all suited and booted, talking to their doting fans (or grumpy customers)! And if you're really geeky, just go to the bar to spot the journalists and PR people deep in conversation...
The thing is, every hi-fi show has its own distinctive character. I do love the UK shows, but sometimes they can be a little too parochial, which is why Hi-Fi World goes out in force every year to the Munich High End Show. This amazing event has vast amounts of kit from every corner of the earth. Of course, as you'd expect, there's a lot of German market-specific stuff (easy to spot because it's got lots of black acrylic with gold plated knobs on), but there's a good deal of British kit too, plus some superlative Japanese high end and now Chinese and South Korean kit as well. All of human life is there, along with their weird and wonderful products, from tonearms made from violin bows to remanufactured V-FET output transistors.
Noel, Adam and myself had an epic few days out in Munich; read our four page show report on p80. We all lived to tell the tale, even if the copious amounts of bread and sausages consumed didn't do our waistlines much good (and the less said the better about the bitter). It was also great fun to meet some globe-trotting Hi-Fi World readers out there, even if my most memorable moment came when I espied a team of ten portly North Europeans sporting ‘Danish High End Club Munich tour 2009' T-shirts, some of whom were striking 'curious' poses for the camera.
Oh well, anything can happen at Munich, and it usually does!
David Price, editor
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