On display in the Hi-Fi News Show ballroom were classic Lowther and Voigt drivers (bottom left is an AC mains-energized field-coil Voigt).

Not mentioned earlier in this report was the fact that there were actually two shows taking place simultaneously this past weekend. For the best part of 20 years, the September Hi-Fi News-sponsored show, usually held at hotels close to Heathrow airport, was the premier UK event. The last few years, however, have seen a steady decline. The decision was therefore made to locate the 2006 Hi-Fi News event at just one hotel, the Renaissance, which was the original venue.

At this point a rival show organiser, Roy Bird of Chesterfield Communications, jumped in and announced an alternative and concurrent show. This would be sponsored by Hi-Fi World magazine, and held in the Park Inn hotel (which had been used by Hi-Fi News for its show for some years previously!)

Gossip and politicking ran for months, with exhibitors choosing one or other, or indeed both—major high-end distributor Absolute Sounds had at least three good-sized rooms in each show! In the event both Shows seemed to go off quite well, and although the trade day (Friday) seemed very quiet in both venues, Saturday was quite busy, and exhibitors I spoke to seemed pleased with attendance. Sunday details and post-show reactions will be reported once everyone has packed up and gone home.

Perhaps the amplifier that had the most influence on modern tube-amp design was the D.T.N Williamson, shown here in an example made by Goodsell of Brighton.

Exceptionally tall speaker engineer Karl-Heinz Fink, and his more diminutive partner Lampos Ferekedis, stand each side of their remarkable prototype BMR technology demonstrator (balanced-mode radiator; see the December 2005 Stereophile). These two, forming a "gang of four" with original inventor Dr Graham Bank and marketing man John Vizor, have licensed the BMR technology from NXT, and the prototype, using a 3.4" BMR unit upwards from 400Hz, via an active crossover, clearly showed the considerable potential of this radical driver, which in effect automatically reduces the radiating diameter as frequency rises.

A complete absence of the usual 2–4kHz crossover lobing artefacts, and wide dispersion to the very highest frequencies were clearly and gratifyingly audible at the company's Hi-Fi News Show demonstration. Indeed, the wide dispersion of this little BMR unit posed a significant design problem in making baffle-edge diffraction effects that much more obvious, the solution combining a wide baffle with a considerable physical driver offset, on both the baffle and a black felt blanket.

According to the glossy leaflet, the Lizard Wizard on show at the Heathrow Renaissance Hotel is, to quote verbatim: "a PMC amplifier that handles High Quality loudspeakers superior, without the everyday type amplifiers air disturbance [acoustic aliasing distortion]." No I'm not sure either, and the rest of the blurb is similarly opaque. Clearly translating Hungarian into English (or even American!) has its pitfalls, and I didn't get much further chatting face-to-face, either. What is certain is that this colourful amplifier looks cute and is incredibly compact—the actual electronics may be seen sitting on the business card just in front. In this case the PMC bit stands for a "ParaMagnetic Current," or virtual-coil amplifier, which is rated at 60Wpc into 8 ohms, but has a specified output impedance of 0–36 ohms. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice once remarked.

If the Ypsilon kit is anything to go by, Greece could be about to join the high-end community. Engineering Director Dimitris Baklavas (pictured at the Hi-Fi News Show) explained that his company has been around for some 12 years, but had only recently developed the sort of products that could take on international High End. Those massively heat-sinked monoblock power amps, for example, use a tube input stage, a class-A MOSFET output stage, and generate around 300W of waste heat each. To reduce the sonic "grain" that is generated by resistors, the preamp has a transformer-based attenuator, the transformer itself having 32 taps and using cotton insulation.

Steve Elford's background in aerospace ultrasonic testing has helped him develop the various Vertex AQ devices. Special support platforms help remove vibrations from components, while the various cables incorporate damping blocks to prevent vibration being passed around the system, as do mains blocks which incorporate parallel RF noise filtering. Vertex were demonstrating their products at the Roy Bird Show.

A neat idea for decorating the walls of your music room see at the Hi-Fi News Show, Art-Vinyl's hinged "Play & Display" picture frames are exactly the right size to accommodate an LP, making it easy to "hang" your favorite album covers as artwork, while the discs inside remain accessible for playing, and can be easily swapped around as the mood takes.

Hervé Délétraz, proprietor and inventor of the rather wonderful Dartzeel amplifiers, and possessor of a great sense of humor, did his best to explain at the Roy Bird Show the operational improvements in the now electronically encoded preamp volume control.

Michael Fremer will be reviewing the Dartzeel preamplifier for Stereophile early in the New Year.

Vivid Audio's stylish speaker range, made in South Africa and engineered by ex-B&W designer Laurence Dickie, is expanding. A compact stand-mount (right), available in two sizes with bass alignment for either boundary or free space siting, has now joined the original B1 (left) and larger K1 models. Vivid speakers were demmed at the Roy Bird Show and are distributed in the US by Musical Surroundings.

Apogee fans will be delighted to hear that the legendary full-range ribbon is back—only it's now manufactured in Queensland, Australia by English immigrant Graeme Keet. Universally known as Graz, he's been in Oz for 18 years, and started offering a repair service for Apogee owners when the company went out of business. He then introduced the Perigee hybrid ribbon models, has now worked out a way of mechanising ribbon production and is putting the Synergy model (shown here at the Roy Bird Show) into production, with a UK pricetag of £13,000/pair ($24,500). The sound in the undamped dem room did seem rather bright, but Graz claims to have achieved dramatic improvements in efficiency over the original Apogees. He can also make replicas of the original models if requested.