Celebrating the Year of the Dragon. Happy New Year from Marten.

As a celebration of the release of these fantastic new speakers, we have one pair that will go to a lucky winner. Please go to www.martencompetition.com and participate.

Good luck!

We would’ve loved to go to the opera here in Munich, it’s supposed to be brilliant but there’s not enough time for that unfortunately. Maybe next time.

Across the square from the Munich Opera House there’s a proper old skool German Restaurant called Spatenhaus. They serve delicious German classics such as suckling pig, sausages, sauerkraut and white asparagus with Sauce Hollandaise. It would be impossible to leave the place hungry, as the portions are very German as well:) Our friends from China enjoyed as much as we did I think.

From left to right, Jörgen’s hand, our distributor in Taiwan – Anton Chang, Anders, our production guy, Jorma Koski, Leif, Mr Wu  – our distributor in China, Mr Lee Ming, Anton’s father and distributor in Taiwan and Leo Yeh, who has the very acclaimed online hifi magazine, my-hiend.com.

That was yesterday and we did survive the evening’s shenanigans so this morning we had a look at these few rooms.

This is Genelec’s very Scandinavian looking room, a nicely stylish space with very good sounding active monitor speakers.

This is where their factory is located. If I were to ever work at a factory I would love for it to be there.

Fridge sized horn speakers from Acapella. Big and impressive sounding.

Here is beautiful The Lars tube amplifiers together with the rather sizable and interesting looking horn speakers from Absolue Creations.

This room had a really nice and calm feel to it as well as great sounds.

The Wilson Audio room had their only light source from the glass roof which made for a really nice and mellow look.

They are using Emm Labs CD source.

Voxativ monolithical speakers. Rather impressive.

Today’s fave record has been ‘We are the Robots’ with Kraftwerk. Every time our room is empty we put this on really loudly and soon enough the room is starting to fill up again:) It sounds awesome. Very suitable when in Germany.

Auf wiedersehen.

Lars

Almost first in today was Adrian Bankewitz from Accuton with family.

He played such a cool record with Chinese drums. Really loud and rumbly, in a good way of course, it sounded awesome. He Xun Tian, is the artist, very famous in China.

Here are today’s favourite vinyl albums: Bob Dylan – Oh Mercy, Chet Baker – Live in Sweden and…

This one, which has such a cool cover, Gerry Mulligan – Night Lights.

Leif finally had a spare moment to take me around a bit of the fair which was really cool.

Here’s Swedish DLS’ latest speaker.

Also their wall hung speaker which is really popular as part of home cinema systems.

EAR-Yoshino sounding nice as usual.

They played this funky album: The Jazz Crusaders – Lighthouse ’68.

Nice stuff from AMC and Audium.

Here is Per Engelholm from Engelholm Audio, changing cables on his brilliant new system.

and their The Shape.

Ok, there has been a lot of Swedish stuff today. It sort of feels like the Eurovision song contest when everyone are voting for their neighbouring countries. We’ll try and be more cosmopolitan tomorrow:)

Tonight it’s party time with our friends form China. Hopefully we’ll survive:)

Over and out.

Lars

What a great place Munich is. Walking around in this beautiful city in the spring weather is a real treat. Popping into a bierhalle for a drink here and there makes it all even better:)

The High End fair is exactly how you would expect it to be in Germany, neat, tidy and well organised with a lot of space for everyone. We had our room set up and ready yesterday evening and it’s actually sounding pretty darn good if we may say that ourselves.

Unfortunately I had a little memory mishap and forgot my Canon 50D that I usually use for all the blog photos but luckily, Leif’s little handy Olympus F1.8 takes great pictures so that is what we’ll be using for this show.

The Coltrane 2, M•Amp and M•Furniture set up with Jorma Design’s brand new cables, Unity. We also use SMT’s lovely looking diffusors that we had in our room at CES 2011 in Las Vegas.

The FormFloors, the FromSub and Bladelius Tyr, playing audio from a MacBook Air also makes for a pretty neat second set up.

Even if the room is quite large we actually filled it most of this rather busy day. Tomorrow the show will open for non-audio business people so maybe it will be even busier.

See you tomorrow with more form the rest of the show.

Lars

A big thank you to Victor Chavira at Positive Feedback for this great review.

“If you are in search of a speaker with exceedingly clear voice and dynamic force to fill a medium sized room with panoramic sound, put the Marten FormFloors at the top of your list. Highly recommended!”

Please read more here.

We have a brand new distributor in Bangkok – Thailand, the home of beautiful silk, delicious green curry and long sandy beaches.

Unfortunately we were not able to go to the very exclusive ‘BAV Hi-End show 2011′ in Bangkok where they exhibited. We don’t want to brag:) but we heard that our speakers were very well received and apparently some customers even suggested that they were ‘best in show ‘.

A big welcome our new distributor:
Elpha Shaw Co. Ltd
elpashaw@cscoms.com

A big thank you to Audio Art in Taiwan for this awesome award:

We like attention so here are a good few more links to where we’ve been talked about around the internet. Please have a look:

“No question that the Coltrane II is an excellent speaker”

Jonathan Valin – The Absolute Sound

“In every case, the Martens sounded outstanding.”

UHF Mag

“potential best-of-show system”

HomeTheater.com

“a sublime sound”

UltimateAVmag.com

“of the sweetest, tamest treble I heard at the show.”

Dennis Burger – HOMEtechTELL
We were also mentioned on these blogs:

audiogon.com
highendpalace.com
hifi.ir
ultimateavmag.com

Thank you very much to all of you.

Marten