SHOW REPORT
Not many things would have descended on Sydney in greater numbers than millimetres of rainfall on the weekend (150mm over 24 hours!), but hi-fi brands were certainly one of them. After a successful inaugural event last April, the Australian Hi-Fi Show 2024 returned to the Sydney Central Hotel to give Sydneysider entertainment fans and audiophiles the opportunity to see and hear some of the best audio and AV products from Australia and all over the world.
Brought to you by Australian Hi-Fi, What Hi-Fi? and Sound+Image magazines from Future Publishing, the three-day celebration of hi-fi and home cinema featured nearly 30 rooms of kit, which included an all-Aussie super system, luscious AlsyVox ribbon speakers from Italy that delivered mindblowing sound and got everyone talking, and even the latest Avantgarde Acoustics horn loudspeaker system shipped in from Germany ahead of its official unveiling at the renowned High End Munich show in May.
If you couldn’t weather the storm to get there (and the sun shone through Saturday and Sunday), don’t fret — the showfloor highlights can be found here, so you can at least see and read what sonic heaven looked like, and get an idea of which demos to chase at your local retailer as the winter months draw in. And hey, there’ll always be next year!
Mezzanine
were together at last in the furthest first-floor mezzanine ballroom. Ever wondered how your music collection would sound through a system costing the equivalent of five Teslas? The Three Aus-keteers treated show attendees to a demo of a near-million-dollar supersystem that sounded like, well, a million dollars. Duntech’s two-metre-tall Princess loudspeakers took the helm, flying the flag for the company’s ‘Prime Directives’ design ethos, and were driven by Halcro’s new stereo version of its legendary Eclipse amplifier, which magazine recently heralded as one of the best-sounding amplifiers in the world. These talents were fed by another in Döhmann’s equally-renowned Helix One turntable, featuring a new Supatrac Blackbird tonearm whose revolutionary patented ‘Sideways Uni-Pivot Arm’ bearing is, if
