Upgrade ya

Over the weekend I had been listening to music through a lot of different headphones — in-ears, on-ears, over-ears; monophonic, stereo, and simulated surround; through alien-looking 24 / 192 DACs, through $20,000 tube preamps; and, to everyone’s horror, jacked directly into my iPod touch (don’t ever get caught without a preamp if you want to be taken seriously by audiophiles). Everything sounded nice, very nice, for sure, but it was all SO expensive!! It’s frustrating to spend all day looking for cheap thrills and just getting a weak, Ferrari-priced scalp massage; nothing, as far as my lumpy ol’ eardrums could discern, beat my trusty Etymotic ER-6i in-ears or my (shockingly good) Skullcandy Hesh 2.0 over-ears, both prosumer models to the core. By the time I had circled back around to Beyerdynamic’s booth I was flopping around the floor like a spoiled, bored child; I slipped on their DT1350’s expecting more of the same.

As the opening beats of Toto’s “Africa” took shape a sense of belonging I hadn’t felt from any other pair of cans crept over me. It wasn’t that sort of distant, limp crispness I’d gotten all day long: It was a loud and super-present hyperactivity, not afraid to engage the kick drum; and when the melodramatic synth line kicked in, it really tugged at my ‘80s-baby heartstrings. Finally, some gear that spoke my language: The $199 “monitoring headphones” seemed to be aimed at actual humans, not these aliens from another time and place with millions of euros and hours to spare on fine-tuning gear to their otherworldly standards.

At the time Toto was coming through in 24 / 192 resolution through the A1 headphone amplifier, and then through the DT1350’s. Knowing I would never spring for the $920 amp, I whipped out my iPod touch and cued up a 320Kbps MP3 of the same song, plugging directly into the eighth-inch out like a real human would.

This ability to A / B test was an anomaly on the floor at High End. If manufacturers had been more willing to do this, I might have had these revelatory experiences more often: While the opening beats still sounded amazing, when the synths kicked in I could really notice a difference. There was a telltale muddling of mid- and low-end, betraying the signature compression of an MP3 file coupled with standard iPod amplification. Let’s be clear: “Africa” still came through crystal-clear, and I wouldn’t have detected the $1,000 / 20x resolution change if the two options weren’t sitting there back-to-back for me to compare. There it was: A real indication that my ear–brain link might be capable of appreciating some level above prosumer.







At the southwest corner of Joe Cocker and Keith Jarrett Streets stood what was by far the most stunning invention in all of High End’s creation: Andrea Pivetta’s Opera Only High End Audio Amplifier. When it’s not functioning, it also summons visions of TMA-1: an awe-inspiring 12-sided black monolith of nebulous origin. And then you turn it on.

The prism unfolds like an alien flower into four discrete sections from its massive core, exposing a vast network of amplification circuitry lit from within. Basically it looks like a CRAY supercomputer with a ground effects kit straight out of The Fast & The Furious 6, but more menacing: an 8-foot tall, 1.5-ton, 160,000-watt force to be humbled by.

How did it sound? I couldn’t really tell, because the puny loudspeakers attached to it were barely loud enough to hear over the showroom din. But something tells me I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it, and if I could, I don’t think that would be the point anyway.

There is something about blasting jams in an enclosed space just for yourself and your two to four closest buds that makes car audio sacred to me

Like Peter Jackson’s emotional fairytale The Lovely Bones, the Opera Only is the work of a monied visionary that’s not meant to enter the commercial marketplace in any monumental way — the blooming black tower isn’t really even for sale. This is something I came to appreciate more and more during my time in Munich: Many of the exhibitors can’t possibly expect to make much money off of their creations. Although it’s billed as a trade show, it might be more widely appreciated if it were marketed more like a custom car exhibition where a bunch of extraordinarily rich and talented enthusiasts express themselves to the highest and most extreme degree possible. Mr. Pivetti was an Italian whose intensity I could relate to.

On the lookout for more relatable high-end experiences, I made my way towards an enclosed mall where the only mobile audio exhibitions were. Since I was a teenager there has really only been one way to get the most out of music: listening in the car. I DGAF if it’s a shitty cassette player run through blown-out factory-installed paper cones: There is something about blasting jams in an enclosed space just for yourself and your two to four closest buds that makes car audio sacred to me.

So it wasn’t so surprising that one of my favorite experiences at High End was inside a car. But this wasn’t the JVC head unit wedged into the 1991 Honda Prelude I grew up on.

This was a 2013 Porsche Cayenne with a €4,700 manufacturer-calibrated premium 16-channel surround sound system by Burmester. If you throw in the car that means the most immersive aural experience of my Bavarian tour was a bargain at around €88,000, and as a bonus you could use it to haul your entire family to Disneyland and the Magic Valet would certainly park it right at the front of the lot. As you handed him the keys you could honestly say “Oh, this old thing? Just picked it up for the sick system, bro.”

And that’s the rarified atmosphere High End Audio exists in. It’s beyond fancy food, fancy cars, and fancy homes: really it’s somewhere near the universe of fancy bourbons.