Hello!
Kash Kabir here – I’m What Hi-Fi?’s hi-fi and audio editor; thanks for stopping by for our very second Substack article. My esteemed colleague Tom Parsons kicked things off last week to give you an insight into how the testing has been going for Samsung’s new flagship OLED TV, the S99H (the review is now live), and how he’s going to use the World Cup as an excuse to test TV broadcast latency issues. (He loves it really).
While Tom was getting excited about the football, I was away in Vienna, Austria, at the annual High End show. It’s the biggest consumer hi-fi trade show in the world, with brands across the globe showcasing their latest audio products, including some incredibly expensive and outlandish fare. I was at the show with my colleagues Ketan, Andy and Harry, and you can see all our coverage from the show here.
But there’s plenty that we don’t tell you about over on the main whathifi.com site. Like how sprawling the Austria Center Vienna venue was (which is a new home for the High End show this year, after many years at Munich’s MOC), to the point where I may have gotten lost after one too many turned corners. Each floor in the main building was vast and endless, with hidden corridors and more rooms opening up just where you thought you’d hit the perimeter of the building. It was a bit like exploring in a video game – what does this corridor behold, and will there be yet another hi-fi brand in a big room with shiny products to show? (Yes.)
Even with extensive planning that we do before we head to the show (there’s a detailed Google Doc) and the availability of maps both physical and in-app, all of that goes out the window when you’re actually at the venue in person, and you just have to explore on foot.
Gratifyingly, I’ve heard from other journalists and the hi-fi brands attending that I wasn’t the only one getting lost. But so much of the worry and trepidation ahead of the show (new venue, new city, new logistics) melted away once the doors opened on 4th June. The show was well-attended and felt thriving, buzzing – electrified not just by large valve amplifiers, but also with a genuine sense of excitement for our industry.
Where the Event Center Messe München was all glass walls and a compact layout, the ACV allowed for proper rooms with no glass – which meant better-sounding rooms, fewer crowded areas, and less of a greenhouse effect when the sun is out.
The bigger rooms also allowed for more space to showcase products. It was brilliant to see Bowers & Wilkins back at a consumer trade show after many years away, and the larger space allowed the brand not just to show off every model in the new flagship 800 Series Diamond D5 speaker range, but also display older speakers from its 60-year catalogue, including the original 801 from 1979.
There was also space for racks of vintage Denon and Marantz products, which I must confess to spending an inordinate amount of my time with – twiddling with the lovely controls and dials on beautifully made old stereo amps and tuners from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Just look at them:
Exploring the venue without worrying about where you ended up also meant that I got to see plenty of surprise products as they weren’t officially launching, or didn’t have a press release, or were only in the concept stage.
I followed the tune of Exile (Taylor Swift/Bon Iver) – a song we use often for testing, but far less usual to hear at a hi-fi show – and found that Fink Team were showing off a new floorstanding speaker. The Fink Team Spot looks rather welcoming, is the smallest floorstander in the brand’s range, with a ribbon tweeter and 8-inch mid/bass driver, and is priced tentatively at €10,000 when they’re out later this year. Legendary speaker designer Karl Heinz-Fink is behind the brand, which naturally piqued my interest, but Karl has stepped away to focus on the Epos brand – so Spot is the work of fellow acoustic engineer and ‘master cabinetmaker’ Norbert Theisges, who heads Fink Team these days.
If you’re wondering about the unusual name, Fink Team’s other speakers are called Borg and Kim – why yes, they are Star Trek fans. The new towers are named after Spot, the pet cat belonging to Data on board the USS Enterprise.
In the room where we found Musical Fidelity’s A1 CD player and its 90s-era ‘frog’ styling, I also saw a whole bunch of potential new Pro-Ject turntables. The most exciting of which is a proposed update to the long-running, multiple Award-winning Pro-Ject Primary E – a budget favourite of ours that is surely overdue an update. The proposed update involves keeping the core design and technology of the turntable intact, but refreshing the cosmetics with new colours, an optional coloured platter, optional coloured belts and a nicer finish. All of this is welcome news to my ears. The Primary E is a superb budget hi-fi turntable that sounds fantastic for the money, but its plain looks and textured finish feel rather basic and outdated now, so I’m all for a fresh lick of paint.
The ability to mix-and-match different colours for the plinth and belt – as seen below with the green plinth and orange belt – is also quite a fun idea.
Trade shows are a great place to see hi-fi brands’ latest products (both mega high-end and reasonably priced), but after 14+ years in the industry, it’s also a great place to see familiar faces and bump into people you don’t often see. That extends to journalists from other titles as we compare notes about the state of publishing over a glass of bubbly or two, as well as the many PRs, engineers and sales/marketing people that we’ve known for years. In an industry where most people stay on for decades (and decades upon decades), shows like High End are as much about the social aspect and catching up with old friends as it is about the work.
We do do work, of course, but I won’t bore you with tales of grabbing a spot in the press room to charge our phone, desperately trying to share hi-res images over the press wi-fi (which was actually pretty solid), and trying to type up a news story or hands-on review as quickly as you can before heading to the next meeting or launch event, all while snacking on some Haribo and guzzling down some water. It’s busy, but it’s also good fun.
🎶 What I’ve been listening to: The Wise Man’s Song by Cinder Well
⚡️Here are some of my favourite articles from the last few days:
Meet the man behind Audio-Technica’s new £9999 turntable cartridge
Nice piece and some decent photographs.
Hopefully more folk will like these pages and leave comments.
It feels a lot more peaceful here, rather than at the main site, which has so much going on at any one time.
Hopefully over here we can stay away from a few things. One being the obsession with green Tuesday or violet Friday or whatever these increasingly annoying little 'sales' days are called.
Maybe that's just me, but I suspect that may resonate with a few more amongst us.
Anyway, off to the latest post now. I'm not reading the first one because tv's are not my thing.
All the best.