High End Munich 2015 – The Room

We were lucky to get some shots of the room yesterday before we opened otherwise it’d have been impossible. There has been a constant crowd hindering the view 🙂 Leif is playing a crazy mix of tunes, everything from Rock with Jimi Hendrix , Jazz with Hiromi and Beethoven with Lang Lang to Electronica with James Blake and Blues with Junior Wells. It all sounds great!

Here is the main system – Four MSB M203 Mono blocks between the pair of Coltrane 3

MSB Electronics with the Hard Disk Player Aurender X100 closest in the middle. All on Solid Tech racks.

Jorma Design cables are being used all over. Here is a Jorma Prime on display.

Our logotypes can be seen behind the new SMT S-Wings.

The brand new MSB Select Dac

MSB Select Dac again but opened up

We will be going on playing music until 6pm on Sunday. You are very welcome to room F214 in Atrium 4.

Coltrane 3 at Munich High End 2015

It sounds amazing!

World record

We have probably beaten our previous record in unpacking to do. This was yesterday so we have come a fair bit on the way and will hopefully be ready in a bit.

Everyone else seem rather busy as well

The show starts tomorrow and we can feel that this will be a good one.

Come and see us and listen to some good tunes!

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:)