product debuts, interviews, “snake oil” etc.

I spent all of day 3 at the Golden Tulip and Sobieski hotels. Golden Tulip has the bigger rooms but far fewer systems, located in the hotel’s second floor exhibition space. This year there were many show highlights at the Golden Tulip including the “thumbnail” photo showing the Danish Zikra Audio room featuring the company’s mono single-ended triode tube amps, preamp and Technics SP-10 based turntable. Company founder Michael Zingenberg brought his large loudspeakers to the show but those are not for sale. The sound in this room was among, if not the best at the show, which surprised my ears because I’m not usually a fan of big horns or SET amps but this system was neither “horny” sounding nor SET warm and “lumpy”. Instead it delivered uncolored “reality” on a grand scale that made it difficult to exit the room.

The sound in the RCM room is always great, usually with Gauder Acoustics speakers. This year RCM’s Roger Ademek had Gauder in a second room and YG Acoustics Hailey 3 speakers in the main room and the sound was admirably open yet full bodied.

A few video highlights: look for the interview with Lockwood loudspeaker’s Paul O’Farrell-Stevens who introduces a new speaker from the company that outfitted Abbey Road, Olympic and other legendary studios back when The Stones, Pink Floyd and many rock legends made their iconic recordings. I’d never heard of the company and had to travel to Poland to find out about them!

Dutch & Dutch introduced at this show a new smaller 6C powered speaker, look for the interview there too and one with Soft Collective’s Gunnar Hildén. The company’s newly introduced speaker sounded superb driven by Zikra Audio tube electronics.

On the YouTube channel you’ll find timings so you can go directly to the segments of interest to you.