by Michael

Vincent Belanger ft. Audio Note U.K. at Munich HiFi Deluxe 2019

Recorded in 24bit, 96khz on May 11, 2019 at the Munich Marriott during Hifideluxe 2019.

Vincent was accompanied by, well, Vincent being played back on an Audio Note U.K. stereo with:

1. X? a prototype Level 5 DAC (on the Fifth Element DAC platform with Fifth Force power supply) with a brand new very bold architecture which is a big departure from what anyone has tried before and a clear advancement of the state-of-the-art
2. AN/E SEC Signature speakers (on “J” stands)
3. Ongaku Kensei stereo 211 power amplifier
4. M9 phono preamplifier
5. TT3 turntable with Arm Three/2 and IO1 cartridge and S9 step-up transformer
6. CDT-Six transport

Vincent was accompanied by the Audio Note system which was – frighteningly(?!) – realistic. From where I was sitting I had to look closely at what Vincent was playing to tell which notes were by him and which were previously recorded [Cellos are much harder for a Hi-Fi to reproduce, to sound correct, than, say, electric guitar for which there are several of these types of live demos]. I guess that is the charm and entertainment here, and with these kinds of demos, but seriously, this was impressive.

There is more to this session in the Audio Note room which we will hopefully get to post shortly.

 

in Audio Note / Featured Audio Note Posts / Munich 2019 0 comments
 by Michael

Back from Munich

[pictured: Hermann Winters of Acapella and Neli of Audio Federation in the Acapella showroom]

But on the way back I caught an “airplane cold”. Bad enough that Neli enforced a 10 foot distance between the diseased one and herself until she left to jet down to Houston [where she gets to compare the Acapella Sphaeron Excalibur speakers we just heard in Germany with the smaller but similar looking Triolon Excalibur speakers, among other tasks like setting up an HRS rack and in general being the life of the party].

So now I sit here staring at 2600 photos and 70 videos and about the same number of 24 bit 96kHz recordings of Munich High-end 2019, Audio Note and Acapella factories, and try figure out how to get these up on the internet in a some kind of organized manner.

First I need to add more memory to my 16GB DELL, because video editing takes mucho memory, and Lightroom in any case likes to grab all the memory and open every single photo it can find on my disk not free any memory for like a day(!) anyway. And before that I want to thoroughly backup the DELL, but memory sticks / thumb drives were so slow, so had to get a nice cheap 2TB drive. Etc. Etc. Etc. can’t wait for AI to get here so computers can take care of their own damn selves.

And can’t wait until the show video+photo post-processing pipeline is all worked out. Steep learning-curve alert for this audiophile.

I want our videos to be quite different than AVShowrooms’s approach – and it may take some time to get them just right.  AVShowrooms has a professional “friendly reviewer” approach that works well for them, but I want to go more for an OMFG “extreme enthusiasts visit Wonderland” kind of approach.

Stay tuned 🙂

 

in Munich 2019 / News 0 comments
 by Michael

Mike and Neli went on a little audio adventure

Mike and Neli went on a little audio adventure to visit Audio Note in the U.K., the Munich High-end 2019 show, and the Acapella Audio arts factory where we listened to the Sphaeron Excalibur speakers (pictured) for most of the day.

Details galore forthcoming after sleep and uploading and sifting through several thousand photos, 100s of videos and many recordings of various systems in 24×96 hi-res audio.

 

 

 

 

in Acapella / Audio Note / Featured Acapella Posts / Munich 2019 3 comments