Ah High End. I live near Munich, so in the past couple of years I spent a couple of full days experiencing the craziness. I find most of the products on display at High End to be ridiculous, and completely out of reach and past the budget for anyone but the very wealthy. Honestly the same goes for AXPONA. I guess people get a rise browsing all the fancy looking "solutions" that are on offer. WTF is going on when a component like a preamp (only one small part of your playback system) costs $30k $40k or $50k, some amplifiers for $100k, and some loudspeaker systems are approaching $500k? These products are no longer targeted at "normal" or even "die hard" audiophiles and music lovers but as playthings for the ultra rich. They will drop a few hundred thousand on a system that sits in their third vacation home that they never visit. There are very few products on offer that I would bother to consider and I can say with all honesty that I do not have any sort of cash flow problems. I primarily visit these shows to talk to industry people face to face about technical stuff, which has always quite fun, actually. Now that the show has moved several hours away from me, to Vienna (lovely city BTW) I decided to stay home.
I suppose the experience one gets at these "high end" type shows is similar to going to an ultra-high-end car show. Sure, you can look at the latest sexy $1M race-inspired model but at the end of the day you will be driving back home in your VW.
. This year is a pass for me, not yet digested last year demonstration of excess.
