At the HiFi Schmiede, in Ettlingen, Germany, we had a very nice surprise. We had more than twice as much participants as expected.
The HiFi Schmiede is situated in an idillic village not far from Karlsruhe, in the south west of Germany. In the ancient time there was a smith, an important one for the region. If You visit the store, other than real good music and ambient, You find remaining of this older use of the area.
The focus was music, and lots has been played. The original idea was to have 20 minutes music and then 40 minutes discussions. In the end there was music from the beginning to the end and always again one question in between.

The whole system was composed by:
- Lindemann 825 CD Player
- Rega RP8 Turntable with Quezo cartridge
- Octave Phonomodule
- Octave V110 Power amplifier
- Genuin FS 2
- Cammino cabling and power supply

With these components and with the fantastic LP collection of Mr. Baumer, it is useless to say how good it has been. If You are even just a little bit curious, You can check the pictures on our gallery here

Our German sales representative made a first approach to his friends at A Cappella, one of the leading horn loudspeakers manufacturer in the world. They invented the spherical horn!! And have a great success with it.
The first approach has been really delightful, let's see what this cooperation will bring for the future... if there will be any :-)

This year has been a low level Munich High End, just supporting STS-Digital at his booth and then the evenings as usual in Walkertshofen.

And supporting Octave as well...

Both companies used our power harmonizer and some of our cabling. Curious? Take a look at the pictures here

Marco our distributor surpassed himself.
He organized the show with an exceptional presence of our brand: our cables and power harmonizers were present in 3 rooms.

In one room there was:
- Genuin FS 1 of Blumenhofer Acoustics
- in a setup with 4 Turntables from Pluto and Acoustics Signature
- 4 Phono preamplifiers from Einstein, van den Hul, Octave and Monk Audio
- and the Octave V110 with a (silver) black box.
- 2 of our Power Harmonizers!!

a really impressive setup.
On the sunday, in this room have been recorded and replayed a live concert of Case Mayfield. It was astonishing to have the artist sitting there and the music playing 1 to 1 and hardly notice a difference between the live and the playback performance.

The second room had:
- Blumenhofer Acoustics Genuin FS 2
- Einstein integrated amplifier
- Einstein Phono Preamplifier
- Dr. Feickert Blackbird
- and just one power harmonizer

The third room showed:
- Blumenhofer Acoustics big Fun 20
- Hans Acoustics Turntables
- and 'just' cabling from us

Here more pictures!

This is not a really Cammino Event, is something that we and Blumenhofer Supported.

The Church Santa Maria Assunta in Bibione received a new organ from one beloved member of his community, Rino Benedet.

Then we discovered that Fritz de With from STS-Digital has a spleen for organ music and loves to record organs.
Agreements were made and quite fast the decision was taken.
With the support of the community in Bibione the Church has been able to finance the production of the CD of the inaugural concert of the organ.

The CD is only for internal use of the Church and for the local community. You can contact Don Andrea Vena here if You wish to have more information about it.

Under magistral conduction of Maestro Daniel Roth from Saint Sulpice in Paris, the result and the sound were really moving.
These and these were the music played and the program of the concert
This concert was the opening concert for the Summer organ concert season in Bibione. Here You can download the whole program of the season.

The Organ comes from the Francesco Zanin company of Codroipo, Udine, Italy. Their site is still in construction but You can reach them here.
Some data of the organ can be read in this document

To perform the recording Fritz de With used a 4 microphone setup, placing 2 microphones in front of the altar directed to the two wings of the organ plus 2 more microphones about 10 meters behind to be able to generate the ambience of the church and eliminate some of the unavoidable disturbs arising during a live concert.
The microphones from Shoeps were connected to a Nagra VI pro 8-channel recorder. The power supply chain of the electronic involved was from us, whom else?

After enjoying the concert in the church, we spent the whole sunday playing the tracks again and again to understand the quality and start a first remixing process to decide the relative levels of the tracks. We were astonished, I've never had the experience of listening for a concert a second time in that quality. It beamed me away into a meditative status: fantastic! I'm looking forward for hearing the CD at my place.

Here some pictures taken during those days

What to tell about the Norddeutsche HiFi Tage.
It is one of the most appealing consumer HiFi shows in Germany and we participated this year as well with Blumenhofer and Einstein.
This time it was not intended to be minimalistic it was a really huge system and played really good music.
The groove was there, the energy pushed us to the wall and the wish to increase the volume was there, but we had to spare the ears of our visitors.
The visitors came… and forgot to leave the room. At certain moments it was that full that we were not able to move.

We had a Genuin(e) good sound. This was the setup:

- Einstein Vorstufe - The Tube
- Einstein Endstufe - The Poweramp
- Einstein CD Player - The Source
- Einstein Phono Preamplifier - The Turntable's Choice
- Pluto Audio Plattenspieler
- Van den Hul Tonabnehmer
- Blumenhofer Acoustics Lautsprecher - Genuin FS 2

Guess which was our part?

And if You are curious to see some pictures, they are here.
See You in 2014!