HIGH END 2022 Show Report
High End Society Munich Germany
Show Report By Carlos Martin Schwab

  First of all, let me introduce myself: I am a pro sound technician and owner of a small recording studio near Munich, Germany. I am also a translator and technical journalist on the subject. I started my relationship with music in the late 1980s as an LP fan, self-taught multi-instrumentalist (guitar and percussion), and member of a black metal band with which I toured for several years in Argentina, my native country.

For someone with a background in professional sound, immersing myself in an insanely expensive home audio fair, or 'High-End' (a term that defines a branch of audio), is as interesting as fun, and that's why I've been doing it since 2014. After three years of silence (and two fairs I attended this same year, PL+S and ISE, both of them far away from pre-pandemic size), HIGH END Munich was better than expected: despite the absence of a few major brands (Audio-Technica, Beyerdynamic, Sennheiser, and Ultrasone, for example), most of the 450 exhibitors did their best and the fair received almost 20,000 visitors.

The HIGH END Munich ambassador's press conference, which I attended because I appreciate the choice of Alan Parsons, a famed musician, and producer who does not come from jazz or classical, started badly: it was in German (with poor simultaneous interpretation into English) until Parsons got on stage and asked to continue in English. I asked him his opinion on loudness war, and he replied "I always considered the dynamics in my work. If someone wants to hear louder, just turn up the volume." The Germans have this thing about forgetting that the language of business worldwide is English, but the saddest thing was to start noticing what the press of HIGH END Munich prioritizes since out of more than 400 accredited people, there were no more than 50 people at the conference.

Gryphon Audio showed (without demos) four of its products: the Ethos CD player (up center), the Commander preamplifier with discrete Class A input buffer and separate power supply (left and down center), the Apex Stereo power amplifier (210 Wpc @ 8 Ohms, 100% Class A and a passive heat dissipation such as to save on heating) and, most interestingly, a prototype of the EOS Design Concept loudspeaker, with customizable colored side panels.

Following with "unplugged" components, LampizatOr had in its booth only three components, two of them were a Horizon DAC and an Amber 4 DAC. 

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