High End Society 2003 Show Frankfurt Germany

Sunday Page 1

  Eventus Audio from Italy specializes in loudspeakers such as their Metis (€3,000 including stand). The cabinet is made from layered MDF for rigidity and to reduce resonances. Inside the cabinet are wood reflectors to insure reduction of internal standing waves.

Mantra Sound's Dulcet hornspeaker (€16,000) employs a very exotic custom 2-inch driver that directly radiates frequencies over 2kHz while the backwave is horn loaded and goes down to 300Hz. A 12-inch Supravox cone woofer fills in the lowermost frequencies. Overall sensitivity is 98dB/W/m while an external crossover is included.

Audio Consulting's Rock Solid's new battery powered solid-state amplifier (€5,000 not including batteries) is point to point wired and designed much like a tube amplifier. All wiring within Rock Solid products is silver including silver wired input transformer. They also have a passive silver wired pre-amplifier. Read our review of their passive pre-amplifier by clicking here.

Keeping with the silver wire theme... QED cables including their Silver Spiral (£90 for meter length) as seen on the top right.

Brinkmann Audio's Carpa loudspeaker (€18,000) features a ribbon tweeter, 20cm midrange, and 28cm woofer. Both midrange and woofer cones are a sandwich of aluminum and a special stiff yet light creation.

We finally were able to sneak a photo of Monster Cable's new loudspeakers!

Canton had a DVD-Audio presentation with five of their Karat Reference 2 DC (€4,000 each). The Karat Reference 2 DC has a 1-inch tweeter, two 6.5-inch midrange drivers and side firing amplified 12-inch subwoofer. Frequency response is from 18Hz to 30kHz. Overall sensitivity is 89dB/W/m while the entire unit weighs in at 63 kg.

Ensemble's Dirondo Drive is strictly a transport ($6,880), yet also available as a player with built-in DAC ($8,580). The transport can digitally output 44.1kHz, 96kHz, or 192kHz.

We here at Enjoy the Music.com™ have always seemed to show Cyrus in silver, so here is their product line in black.

While the Transparent Reference MM SS loudspeaker cable is $18,000, all of the new Transparent cables have been changed internally for 2003 as a trickle own from their Reference technology. The most significant change has been in using larger, solid core wire strands. They have also further dampened the cables to reduce internal resonances. Photo has new cable on top, old one below for comparison.

Something not normally seen at shows, yet a living legend in the audio newsgroup for us old timers. i now present to you Joly. Yes friends, Romans and countrymen. While there were no signs saying these loudspeakers will sooth my brain nerve, they were naturally looking for distributors as many other manufacturers do during a show. Hopefully all the years of Joly jokes have subsided and the company can now move forward.

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