Série Noire

Now, this is pretty cool. When we took part in the Munich HiFi Show earlier this year, the guys from Nagra brought this little old school gadget called Nagra SN ‘Série Noire’ recorder. I had a chat with Matthieu Latour and found out some interesting facts about it.

Nagra started making it back in the early sixties on a request from the CIA. The CIA used it solidly for about a decade and so it didn’t exist to the rest of the world. However, technology eventually caught up and spies started using detection devices that read frequencies that the ‘Série Noire’ recorder used and in the end it was fairly common to use both the recorder as well as the detection device.

There’s a story about an American spy meeting a Russian ditto that started chatting about their Nagra gadgets without any other introduction, they just both knew they both were wired. Probably a similar conversation to what goes on today, comparing iPhones and other gadgets.

When it was released to the general public it became very popular with film making as it’s so small that the actors can fit it in a pocket and then record their lines. It was also used by NASA in space travel.

When it’s closed it looks like it could have been made by Apple, only 50 years earlier. An inspiration for the macbook perhaps?

I really wanted to sneak it into my pocket and ‘borrow’ it but I guess that would’ve been downright stealing, not sneaking. I’m surprised none else did. Maybe the prospect of having the CIA after you scared people off:)

Surf’s Up

There’s this amazing huge park in munich, called Englisher Garten where there are a lot of canals that you actually can swim in. At the last day of our visit last week, the weather was so warm and the park filled up with sunbathers and also surfers.

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One of the canals has a constant wave you can surf on. Pretty cool eh?

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We ♥ Munich (and high-fidelity)

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