We found our mate Wes not far from ours, looking very professional with his new set up. Do like the logo work as well:)

He had this rather cool looking prototype of a new pre amp/dac from Viola Labs that you remotely control with an app on your iPhone.

New Hansen Audio loudspeakers in an unusual grey leather finish.

Humongous but still somehow very neat looking Redpoint turn tables in bright white. It all sounded really good.

Good stuff as usual from Venture in lovely Macassar Ebony wood finish.

Cool looking oblong shaped speakers from Vivid Audio.

The background at Jeff Rowland looked like a manifestation of sound.

The Bladelius room

with their brand new mono block amps. Good stuff as usual.

We’ll be back tomorrow, now it’s time for Stone Crabs at Joe’s

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

M•Amp by night

We have a lot more to show from CES 2011 so here we go:

The new, very interesting USB Dac from Bladelius. Seems to have very high quality both in performance and appearance.

The new Tyr II from Bladelius where you can get the Dac built in.

Bladelius Embla and Thor III in front of the Trump tower.

Interesting stuff from Taiwanese San Lawren.

Great sounding loudspeakers from Estelon, Estonia. This room had a really nice jungle feel to it:)

Acapella loudspeakers with Einstein Audio electronics sounded really good as usual.

Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

The Acapella loudspeaker tweeters are interestingly using a sort of plasma technique.

Cheers for now.

Lars

Erik Andersson and Ola Hesselvall, demonstrated their latest amplifier project: The Dream. This has been legendary audio designer Erik’s dream for many years and he has really put all of his experience and heart into it.

The tube amplifier has direct heated triodes (Russian GM70) which are unusually powerful for being single ended (40W). The setup was really something, with our new reference model Coltrane Momento, Jorma Prime cables, Bladelius Embla CD-player, EAT Forte turntable, Helius Omega 12″ tone-arm, Einstein Audio TU3 cartridge and Einstein Audio “Little Big Phono” phonostage.

The furniture used was G.A.D.-Marten. By that we mean the audio furniture and not the brand of the sofa we sat on. And no, it’s not from IKEA:)

Hesselvall Audio The Dream in cool bright red.

Everything set up and ready to go in the Marten Centre main listening room.

Leif Olofsson, Erik Andersson and Ola Hesselvall.

It was a great weekend and thank you very much to everyone involved.

Lars

However, we did get a load of energy back in the Kubala Sosna room in the midst of the afternoon where recording guru Jim Merod had a really nice and relaxed “show and tell”. We heard loads of anecdotes from his career and so many awesome recordings which reminded us about what this whole thing is about, music. The piece that really stuck with me was a piano recording with a pianist called Larry Fuller. Sorry to say that I can’t remember what the tune was called but this musician is definitely worth checking out. Thanks Jim for a real passionate attitude to music.

The system used was our Birds with E.A.R. Electronics Acute CD-player, 890 mono blocks, Veloce battery powered tube pre amplifier and of course Kubala Sosna cables.

Leif in the foreground listening to jazz stories.

Before that we went to the Bladelius room and had a listen to the new Getz loudspeakers with their new

power amplifier Ask.

The Bladelius Embla CD/media player.

In the Vitus Audio room the Coltrane Momentos were playing with Vitus Electronics, Bergmann air bearing turntable and Purist Audio Design cables.

Vitus mono blocks SM-010.

This is our home base, the E.A.R. room.

The system we used this year was our brand new “Getz”, E.A.R. Acute CD-player, Dic Master turntable, 912 pre amp, 509 mono blocks and of course Jorma Design new Origo cables. 

with Dan The Man playing his wicked tunes.

We also met Adrian Bankewitz from Thiel & Partner/Accuton that produces the ceramic driver units for our loudspeakers

as well as Henry Ahn, our new distributor in Korea who joined us later for a pre-amp sized steak at Ghallager’s famous steak house.

Not suitable for vegetarians.

See you tomorrow.

Lars

Finally in glitzy Las Vegas and all that comes with it; casinos, Elvis impersonators, drive-in weddings and of course the biggest Electronics Show in the world. As you get used to the perfumed air (they actually scent the air in most of the casinos) it is quite a cool place to be.

Here at The Venetian, known to be one of the biggest hotels in the world with more than 4000 rooms, the show has slowly been getting together during the day and is almost ready for the big day tomorrow.

Our great distributor in The States, Dan Meinwald getting the E.A.R. room ready.

All things under control with Coltrane Momento in the Vitus Audio room. Hans-Ole Vitus chatting to Jörgen and Leif.

The Coltrane Soprano looking lonely in the Engstrom & Engstrom (The Lars) room. This room looked really stylish at the end of the day, we’ll show more photos later on.

Un-packing the Heritage Getz loudspeakers for the world-premiere in the Bladelius room.

A fellow blogger perhaps, in a quiet corner of The Venetian.

We’ll be reporting more tomorrow, now it’s time for a burger.

Lars