Exclusive: Inside Vienna High-End 2026 — The Pinnacle Of Luxury Sound Unveiled
From flagship high-end audio debuts to artisan audiophile craftsmanship, this year's HIGH END 2026 Vienna hi-fi show sets a new benchmark for excellence in audio performance.
HIGH END 2026 Vienna Show Report By Jason Kennedy

Grimm Audio
Grimm Audio has established its MU2 as one of the most compelling streamers on the market, but they are not just about digital; the company started out with active DSP loudspeakers and has subsequently built a fine phono stage. For HIGH END 2026, Vienna Grimm unveiled a mono block power amplifier called PA1, their angle is that power transistors are highly sensitive to temperature variations and that low frequencies can modulate the temperature and cause crossover distortion. Their solution is to use a lot more output transistors than usual, 92 small ones to be precise, and to mount these on an aluminum PCB that sits up against the heatsink, which they say eliminates thermal distortion.

The demonstration via prototype Grimm loudspeakers backed this up with a very fast and dynamic sound with bass that was both tight and bodacious, alongside a degree of immediacy that made the snap of an electric guitar highly convincing. At €23,500 a pair, the PA1s sound like they will do Grimm's reputation a lot of good.

AMR
AMR was the brand that Vincent Luke, Thorsten Loesch, and others formed in the 1990s, building some rather nice electronics before realizing that the market for high-end was never going to be huge and developing the far more affordable iFi Audio range that has done rather well. Now, a division of iFi has re-launched the AMR name with design input from John Curl; they are substantial components with the range name Luna. There was an image of the moon in the room, but the components looked so space-age that it was largely superfluous.

These components include the Ingenii, which is a 32-bit DAC running NOS TDA1541 multi-bit chips alongside something called a Stonehenge DSD engine. The Medii is a preamplifier described as being a world first because it has no potentiometer, stepped attenuator or volume IC in the signal path, while the Procellarum is a monoblock power amplifier which is described as a four-quadrant fully balanced FET design.

These units combine silver wiring, Audio Note Silver Tantalum resistors, custom Teflon capacitors, Exicon lateral MOSFETs, WBT NextGen silver connectors, and hand-matched NOS tubes. So the price is always going to be high. I couldn't get much more indication than a $400,000 ballpark figure for the system, and there wasn't enough space in the room to listen. But this is a brand with ambition and a totally new look.

Wand
Richard Ward makes Wand turntables and tonearms in New Zealand, and his The Wand Dark/Light carbon fibre arm with its distinctive tapering carbon fibre tube has been getting strong reviews of late. He recently introduced a 12" version of the Dark/Light that was fitted to a Wand 14-4 turntable, running a DS Audio E3 cartridge in a booth at the High End. The electronics were courtesy of Vietnamese brand Mavis, who are clearly keen on vacuum tubes as well as having created the PH-DS1 phono preamplifier with an optical input specifically for the DS cartridge range. The system also included a Mavis MMS-1 streamer and M90-P hybrid amplifier driving Apertura Kalibrator Evo speakers from France.

Richard suggested something from Talk Talk's Colour of Spring, so we went for 'Happiness is Easy', the first track. I used to love this album in the 1980s, but haven't returned to it much, and was not prepared for the emotional impact it had. I felt a lump in my throat within the first few bars, not a common experience at a show at all. It might have been the combination of components, or perhaps the Wand Dark/Light is a seriously good tonearm; a 12" that doesn't sound slow, but whatever the reason, I need to try this arm at home and soon.

SOtM, Doshi, And Joseph Audio
Another interesting system was that shared by SOtM, Doshi, and Joseph Audio. I was recommended to visit this room by someone whose ears I tend to agree with, and I was not disappointed. The front end consisted of more SOtM boxes than you would have thought possible, given that there was just the one streaming source coming out of them. Apparently, three units were network switches, several more were power supplies, and others were USB filters and the like. The large boxes on the rack tops are sMS-2000 server / streamers running Diretta software, and there is a sDP-1000EX DAC in the right-hand rack. Amplification was provided by Doshi in the form of an Evolution line preamplifier and Evolution Stereo hybrid power amplifier with a 6CA7 tube output stage.

The Joseph Pulsar2 Graphene speakers really worked well in this system and achieve the rare trick of making Oscar Peterson sound good! Usually, he sounds like a great musician that's just a little too laid back, but here the sound was riveting; clearly, this system was doing quite a lot right.

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