Not many things would have descended on Sydney in greater numbers than millimetres of rainfall on the first weekend of April (150mm over 24 hours!), but hi-fi brands were indeed one of them. After a successful inaugural event last year, the Australian Hi-Fi Show returned to the Novotel Sydney Central Hotel to give Sydneysider audiophiles the opportunity to see and hear some of the best in audio and AV from Australia and all around 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 system costing the equivalent of five Teslas; AlsyVox ribbon speakers from Italy that delivered mind-blowing sound and got everyone talking; and even the latest Avantgarde Acoustics horn loudspeaker system weeks before its official unveiling at the High End Munich show.
If you couldn’t weather the storm to get there, don’t fret — the showfloor highlights can be found below, so you can at least see what sonic heaven looked like and get an idea of which demos to chase your local retailer for as the winter months arrive. And hey, there will always be next year!
Bowers & Wilkins, Classe, Denon & more (Masimo Consumer)
Visitors who approached the show from bottom to top would have come across a hi-fi legend very early on. Masimo Consumer’s flagship demo (of several!) housed Bowers & Wilkins’ 801 D4 representative of the all-singing-all-dancing 800 Diamond Signature Series. Alongside high-end Classe Delta pre and power amplification, naturally, fed by the Marantz 30n player (a Denon turntable was there to tag-team) and connected by AudioQuest, the new 801 D4 did what they do best — highly insightful, dynamically expressive, tonally-straight-down-the-middle renditions. You wouldn’t have heard Leonard Cohen’s vocal in You Want It Darker quite like that through another system had you played it in every other room at the show.
Across the corridor was another B&W speaker series with 800 Diamond-levels of fame: the affordable — and ever-brilliant in its eighth generation — 600 Series, paired with Marantz’s PM7000N streaming amp. And ensuring no visitor was left short of demos to choose from in Masimo’s lower ground
