Brilliant Corners #18: Adventures in Schwabylon, Ortofon Cadenza Mono Phono Cartridge

Meeting up at High End Munich: Grover Neville (left), a contributor to Stereophile‘s late headphone blog InnerFidelity, with his dad, Craig, a civil engineer from Chicago.

“Schwabing isn’t a neighborhood, but a state of being,” declared the Countess Fanny zu Reventlow, an early feminist who scandalized German society by parenting out of wedlock, carrying a revolver, and practicing what today tends to be called ethical nonmonogamy. Thomas Mann described the fellow denizens of this northern corner of Munich as “the most singular, the most delicate, the boldest exotic plants.” At the turn of the last century, Schwabing was on its way to becoming the artistic epicenter of Europe, a laboratory for the most progressive social ideas, and arguably the birthplace of modernity. Kandinsky made Western art’s first abstract painting while living there; local cafes once patronized by Lenin would soon host a young Adolf Hitler. Some called it Schwabylon.

These days, Schwabing’s spotless, freshly paved streets are lined with the glass-and-steel facades of Hiltons and Marriotts. Its proximity to MOC, Munich’s titanic convention center, has turned the neighborhood into a destination for business travelers from near and far. The avant-garde salons and manifesto writers are gone. In today’s Schwabing, you’re more likely to stumble across the loaded nachos special at Champions! American Sports Bar.

This once-bohemian district is where I sheltered while visiting High End Munich 2024. This year’s installment felt more crowded than the last, with more rooms to gawk at, gear that looked even more exotic and impractical, and longer lines for beer at the Paulaner stand in the courtyard.

Eager to visit the massive Silbatone room, where I pitched my metaphorical tent at last year’s show, I headed to MOC’s second floor only to find the South Korean company’s exhibit missing. I checked the floor plan three times to make sure I hadn’t gotten lost. As it turned out, the Silbatone team had a good reason to skip the show: They were in Seoul for the opening of head honcho Michael Chung’s latest venture, the Audeum, a wildly ambitious hi-fi museum located in a quiet residential neighborhood with a commanding view of Cheonggye Mountain.

Clearly, Chung hasn’t skimped on his brainchild. Superstar architect Kengo Kuma designed the porcupine-in-space building, while Kenya Hara, art director of housewares store Muji and one of Japan’s leading designers, harmonized the interior. According to Silbatone’s J.C. Morrison, the Audeum offers four floors of audio gear from 1917 to the 1960s, fully restored and set up to play music. Highlights include a midcentury Siemens/Klangfilm system, 12A and 13A systems from Western Electric, and probably the world’s sole functioning Western Electric M1 Mirrophonic setup—located in the museum’s café! The Audeum is not yet fully staffed, and it isn’t open every day, so check the website to schedule a visit.

I did manage to bump into last year’s Silbatone-room deejays, tonearm mavens Frank Schröder and Thomas Schick, who kindly invited me to lunch with a gaggle of German colleagues. We skipped the MOC cafeteria and headed a few blocks away to a lovely outdoor biergarten where, in the shade of weeping willows, we washed down serviceable schnitzel and vibrant salad greens with tall mugs of Helles.

With his pencil mustache and vaguely Polynesian shirts, Frank Schröder looks a bit like Fred Schneider of the B-52s. He has the manner of a curmudgeonly but secretly goodhearted professor who can barely hide his impatience with his harebrained students. Schröder’s nearly mythical reputation as a tonearm designer makes this manner tenable. After more Helles, I asked whether he might be willing to have one of his record players be the subject of a column in this magazine. “I have no interest in marketing anything,” Schröder replied. “But I would agree if it could be an opportunity to discuss analog design.” Challenge accepted, Frank.

Sitting beside me at the biergarten was another Frank. Herr Blöhbaum, who designs gear for German hi-fi brand Vincent Audio, regaled us with stories about his early days in East Germany working with colleagues in the Soviet space program—and the lifelong feelings about Russians this experience engendered. Blöhbaum also told me about one of his latest creations: a reasonably priced, limited-edition preamplifier that uses a trio of vintage Telefunken PCF 803 triode-pentodes. I hope to hear a Vincent SA-T7 Diamond in my system sometime soon.

Perhaps the room that surprised me most belonged to Quad.

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I’m a longtime fan of the company’s original electrostatic speaker, Peter Walker’s legendary ESL57, which manages to convey music (or at least its midrange) with a lucidity that has yet to be equaled. Still, I’ve never been tempted to own a pair. Their magical sound comes with well-documented limitations, like a rather polite dynamic range, truncated frequency extremes, and some resulting genre incompatibilities: Try to play parking-lot-party reggae on a pair of Quads and you’ll see what I mean.

The company’s first new electrostatic speaker in 12 years, the ESL-2912X seems to have made dramatic inroads addressing the original ESL’s downsides. Though the silly rainforest electronica being played reminded me of a West Elm showroom, I couldn’t help being struck by the speakers’ planetarium-like soundstage, ample bass, more-than-respectable dynamics, and beguiling electrostatic midrange. Their priest-black styling didn’t hurt, either. Even the difficult-to-please composer, pianist, and label head David Chesky, who was sitting beside me, looked impressed. Quad was demonstrating the newest ESLs with its solid state electronics, but MoFi’s Jonathan Derda told me that they’re happiest being driven by moderately powered tube amps; despite their lowish sensitivity rating, they apparently excel with 30–40 thermionic watts. The 2912X (priced at €17,000/pair) should be available later this year, and if all goes well, a pair may drop by for some quality time here in Brooklyn.

Those who’ve read this column won’t be surprised that my proclivities led me to audition more than a few systems designed around horns—in terms of immediacy, excitement, and lifelike dynamic expression, speakers using this antique technology still open a heavy can of whoop-ass on most of their cones-in-a-box competitors. And as this year’s High End Munich demonstrated, horns show no sign of going away.

Supravox KL Heritage loudspeakers.

My vote for the prettiest horns goes to the Supravox KL Heritage floorstanders, which were shown together with Line Magnetic’s LM-519 integrated amp, a two-chassis beast that produces 50 single-ended watts from a pair of bowling-pin–sized 212 triodes. Though I wasn’t able to glean much information about the Supravoxes, the sound they created was refined, delicate, and sweet, with as much on offer for the eyes as for the ears.

Cessaro Horn Acoustics.

The Cessaro Horn Acoustics room on the first floor was positively cavernous compared to most, which was useful given the mammoth size of the company’s Zeta Horn ZR3 speaker system with powered subwoofers (around $600,000). The bass horns alone could have sheltered a group of picnickers from a sudden rain shower. Fed by a Döhmann Helix One Mk3 turntable and amplification from Acustica Applicata, the system made “Jubilee Street” from an LP of Nick Cave’s Push the Sky Away sound commanding and natural. The presentation wasn’t quite as coherent as that of Cessaro’s slightly less ambitious setup at the previous year’s show, but that could have been a result of the larger room’s acoustics or the considerable ambient noise at the packed demonstration.

Despite Acustica Applicata’s claims that theirs are not hybrid amps, these devices are said to somehow squeeze three-figure wattage from a pair of single-ended triodes. Puzzled by the seemingly magic technology inside, I was delighted when the company’s Fulvio Chiappetta consented to give a short talk. I’m sorry to report that Signor Chiappetta’s English was a bit rudimentary, as is my grasp of the theory, and aspects of the design remain classified, so my confusion about how these fine-sounding components work remains in force.

Thrax Audio Gaida.

I spotted Frank Schröder again in the room belonging to Bulgaria’s Thrax Audio. The company’s refreshingly compact direct-drive turntable, the Yatrus, uses a tonearm designed by Schröder, who was on hand to show off his sick deejaying skills. He played a gorgeous recording on vinyl of a solo performance by Oscar Peterson. Though Peterson’s music isn’t usually my thing, it sounded utterly natural, rich, and embodied through the Gaida, a three-way active speaker system containing two 15″ woofers per side, current-drive amps, and DSP inside jet-black Corian cabinets that vaguely resemble JBL professional monitors. According to Thrax’s Rumen Artarski, the Gaida will run you around $100k/pair.

The wood-bodied Fyne Audio Vintage 12.

A few doors away, I was captivated by a more modest (in terms of size and cost) system in the Fyne Audio room. The Scottish company’s Vintage 12 loudspeaker, paired with its new SuperTrax supertweeter and Rega electronics, played music in a human-scaled, refined, altogether fun fashion. For years I lived with a pair of 1976 Tannoy Ardens, and the distinctive sonic signature of their point-source dual-concentric drivers—in which the woofer acts as a horn for the tweeter—was audible in the Vintage 12s. I would describe it as a coherent richness. Naturally, the Fynes sounded more technically accomplished than my beat-up Ardens, but the family resemblance was unmistakable.

If you’ve ever wondered about the similarities between the products made by Tannoy and Fyne, as I have, it turns out that Fyne was founded in 2017 by a group of former Tannoy employees, including technical director Dr. Paul Mills. After Tannoy’s new owner, Philippines-based holding company Music Tribe, shuttered the storied 90-year-old speaker maker’s Coatbridge, Scotland, factory and moved much of the manufacturing to China, some employees decided to take matters into their own hands. So it’s no surprise that Fyne speakers share some technologies pioneered by Tannoy and are made in Scotland. Happily, the results sounded downright lovely.

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