“Before anything else,

preparation is the key to success”

said Alexander Graham Bell, perhaps the worlds first audiophile. Preparing is exactly what we’re doing these days yet another time at the CES Show 2014 in glorious Las Vegas. There’s a lot work left but tomorrow the preparation should be done.

We will get back to you soon, with more stuff from it all.

Cheers

Happy New Year!!

Have a good night with lots of music and fun! Well wishes for next year from all of us here at Marten!

My-Hiend Award!

Best performance award from well renowned Taiwanese online hifi magazine My-HiEnd for our Coltrane.

Many Thanks!

Something’s going on…

at the marten site. Have a look!

Paris

Last weekend was a busy one in Paris. We went to the Haute-Fidélité show together with Aphrodite’s Melody and exhibited Django L and Getz 2. Great show with a lot of interest as you can see:) Thanks to everyone that came and made for a fun Show.

Electric blues boy

One evening not long ago we went to see wonder child James Blake at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London. A wonderful experience of sound, light and music. There have been a lot of superlatives mentioned about this guy before but we thought it wouldn’t hurt to add some to the collection.

He has an incredible talent of making his recorded electronic Dubstep inspired music sound extremely warm and fuzzy. When he performs this live it has an even more warm and personable. He has an incredible control over his voice and records the imaginative backing vocals on spot until it reaches some kind of nirvana of unusual harmonies. Even though the control of the voice it only sounds as if just happens, that it’s just the way he sings and always did without any training. During the concert you become embedded into his world of warm, and beautifully moody sounds and even the dadaism-ish sampled lyrics become sort of meaningful and poetic: Look I found her red coat, look I found her, DAMN!

Well done Mr Blake, we will make an effort to see you again.

Photo by Siamak Amini

Sjöströmska kvartetten

This weekend we had four very talented ladies here. Sjöströmska Kvartetten is a string quartet based in Gothenburg that has been around since 2007. They were very thorough and professional which suited our special project perfectly. We will tell you more about this in a while. It’s exciting stuff.

You can find out more about them here: Facebook, website, Myspace

Australian Audio & AV Show 13

This weekend our distributor Absolute Hi End in Australia was showing our Django L at the ‘Australian Audio & AV Show 13‘ in Melbourne. Great show all round with loads of good music and audiophiles. We hope you had the opportunity to visit.

TAVES – Toronto Audio Video Entertainment Show

Our great distributor ‘The Gramophone‘ in Canada will be participating in the TAVES show at the King Edward Hotel on November 1, 2 and 3rd, 2013 – downtown Toronto.

Brian Taylor at ‘The Gramophone’ tells us:
“We will be showing the Marten Django XL along with Luxman amplification and their new DSD DAC along with Esoteric CD/SACD player, the AMG Turntable and Tonearm, Benz Cartridge, Musical Surroundings Nova Phono Stage and Audiodesk Systeme Vinyl cleaners. It is our room but Garth Leerer of Musical Surroundings will be helping as he has done dozens of shows over the past 25 years and he is the distributor of the AMG table for the world outside of Europe.”

Please come for a listen if you are around. It looks like it will sound awesome.

The Ice Queen

A few days ago we had the opportunity to go to one of the concerts of the year. The Icelandic icon Björk put on a spectacular show at London’s Alexandra Palace. The venue has a bit of a reputation for bad sound quality but we didn’t need to worry as Björk evidently has a rather high quality control.

No photography or filming was allowed but people didn’t seem to care much. We would never disobey Björk though so we didn’t take more than one photo before it started but we can tell you that it sounded and looked great.

The stage was placed in the middle of the hall and had lots of massive wooden machine like things that sometimes started moving when the music went particularly industrial. And it often did, extremely heavy stuff that blew you away. In contrast to this she had the Icelandic women’s choir ‘Graduale Nobili‘ that juxtaposed the bassy beats brilliantly. The favourite was ‘Isobel‘ where the choir mimicked the intricate string section, originally arranged by Brazilian composer Eumir Deodato.

They also filmed the whole show for a dvd release (or maybe TV, we don’t know) so after some of the songs, Björk kindly asked if they could do a repeat, and no one complained of course. At the end of it she said: ‘God, I’ve never chatted this much at a show’ which makes us wonder how quiet she would be if the filming wouldn’t have been going on. We guess she’s all about performing and not entertaining. And that she does brilliantly.

We ♥ you Björk