MUNICH HIGH END 2025 – ROUNDUP

The Munich High End show is that most critical part of the calendar where a dealer gets to cement and fortify existing relationships and also forensically research new developments within the industry. It is here in southern Germany, where historically, new partnerships can begin and the latest and greatest products can begin to forge a retail pathway back into customers homes here in the UK.

2025 was a fairly gruelling schedule. We had many appointments to attend, quite a few customers to host both new and existing, and then a fair amount of groundwork to get through for up and coming brands and products coming to us later this year. It was hugely successful for us in all respects though and very productive in terms of the continued growth and expansion of Lotus which we will see throughout 2025 and into next year.

Let’s begin somehwhere extremely relevant. Soulnote are the very latest brand to join us and we have seen an accelerated and eye opening start to the intial traction of this ingenious outfit from Tokyo. The exceptional sound quality is one thing, the keen pricing and brand optics are another. In just 5 months we have sold a surprising amount of units and witnessed lots of fervent interest. All of this and yet we haven’t really even got going with the blogs and more focused marketing yet.

Although they have improved the voicing of late, YG loudspeakers are not really my type of coffee but the main Soulnote room at the MOC still sounded superb. This featured a Thorens deck with optical cart and E3 optical phonostage, P-03 preamplifier into the new M-3X mono amps. The space and flow/timing was exemplary and the Soulnote’s density, natural articulation and superb harmonics went some way to medicating the speakers tilt towards the lean and wiry. I will have some very special news soon on the electronics featured here – the pre and mono amps – another Lotus exclusive for you all to enjoy.

On the friday evening it was my great pleasure to meet up with UK distributors Kog Audio, the main man Hideki Kato and all the team at Soulnote, and discuss all things Amps, Preamps, Dacs and of course lightweight English sports cars ! So much more action to come from this newest brand to Lotus.

Tidal Audio always show a very strong hand at Munich, some 380 miles from their HQ back in Koln and this year was no exception, with the launch of the new AP1 ‘amplified performance’ floorstander which we have already been demoing here for some time now. The set of AP1 they ran were fresh out of the box so sounded progressively better and better as each day went by. As is customary, Jorn and his team showed in very simplistic minimalist form, bucking the high end trends of multiple boxes and infinite racks mated to million pound plus speakers. Many who “get” the Tidal sound – including some of our own owners and customers – felt this room was unrivalled at the show for its sense of truth, and its abilty to perform that most difficult of disappearing acts where the system and notion of electronic reproduction completely leaves ones perceptions.

At the far end of the room lay a solitary duotone Bugatti Royale, its rich metallic blue burnished in the spotlights and next to it, the grandfather of the Tidal Contros, a beautiful MC-1 controller in matching regal hue and weaved carbon. Admiring the Royale front on it was remarkable just how slim it looked and also short and compact overall compared to its AP1 descendant to its left. And to think that despite this much smaller presence, its bandwidth, scale, depth and dynamic ability goes far far beyond the very high benchmark set by the AP1. A difficult comparison to really get your head around but the answer lays in the Bugatti cabinet which costs as much to manufacture as the whole of the AP1 put together, with it’s error checking subwoofer technology and far more advanced construction and resonance control technology.

Munich 2025 was most definitely the year of the Wadax Studio Player. Much of the industry has now discovered what a few of us have known for some time, that Studio Player sets a new reference benchmark for digital audio. Manufacturers and distributors across the globe have chosen it to best showcase their own equipment and it appeared in no less than 9 different rooms here, adorning such industry giants as Magico, Audio Research, Rockport, Gobel, Engstrom, Avantgaarde. We definitely backed the right horse then when we bought our very own Atlantis Reference system back in 2024.

I walked into nearly all these rooms and although they were all wildly different systems, set up in different ways, the Wadax magic very obviously shone through in every single example. You hear it immediately.

The Thrax room never disappoints here and it’s naturalness and feeling of intense tangibility and realism is always notable. Rumen Artarski this year ran the Yatrus turntable with Mysonic Lab MC, Maximinus ladder DAC (fed by Xact audio server) into Libra 300B linestage, Heros mono amps and then Lotus speaker favourites Lrya SE with Hades subwoofer stands. The system was shod top to bottom with Hemingway cables.

Within this chain, Thrax also unleashed a standout launch very much with UK buying habits in kind. Presenting the space age Cotys MC Phono stage, the first in a sequence of affordable micro chassis products from Sofia in Bulgaria. Soon to follow will be a USB Dac with a single input analogue linestage, and a stereo power amplifier all in the same form factor and all around 9000 Euro per box as the target price. So a fully fledged system then which will occupy a tiny part of your room, and with sonic performance that gets scarily close to the ability of the Thrax reference products (Maximinus, Orpheus) at half or even a third of the cost. Seen pictured on top a regular size Maximinus Dac for scale reference.

The Hemingway Audio Munich HQ was once again situated in the Thrax room. We had a long catch up with the team from Seoul and discussed all things past, present and future. The existing Hemingway range of cables and interconnects wants for nothing and we generally like strong product stability but we can expect a small smattering of interesting tweaks and new items in the near future. We also firmed up a Lotus factory visit and tour for later this autumn so an in depth look at Hemingway in the blogs is coming soon when we make the long trip to South Korea.

Finally this year we got to hear Lynx. Rockport Technologies debuted the compact and quite wonderful Lynx last year in static form but this year we got to enjoy them the whole 4 days, fed by Absolare electronics and yet another Wadax Studio Player (which we understand is their new reference in their listening room over at the factory in Maine).

Lynx in overview are an aluminium cast junior Orion with matched DAMSTIF3™ cabinet technology to make for a huge internal volume, an incredibly low noise floor, unmatched dynamic contrasts and astonishingly low level information retrieval. With Rockport’s customary dead quiet performance, refined yet ultra resolution highs and some of the best bass transparency and positional stability in the industry, this room at Munich – despite being on the tricky side acoustically – was an absolute gem and many have since marked it down as their favourite of the show or certainly in the top handful of rooms out of litreally hundreds.

On the back of our success with Atria II and Avior II models, we are really looking forward to Lynx coming to us very soon … performance at the very upper limit of loudspeaker design but yet in an unusually compact footprint for smaller UK homes