One of the few local, truly high-end brands, Tune Audio brought the big Anima speakers to the show. These three-way, all passive horn loaded speakers have been turning heads for some time now in Munich and for good reason. A titanium diaphragm tweeter with neodymium magnets, in-house modified 5” midrange and a 15” down-firing woofer all of which are crossed in 1st order make up for a total 109dB of sensitivity. Let me emphasize this, there are no class D modules for the 15” woofer, no hybrid-servo assisted, no nothing.
The high frequency horn is built with a proprietary epoxy resin compound while the mid one is sculpted from Baltic birch plywood. The huge vertical horn acts both like a stand for the 2 smaller horns and mounts on top the 15” woofer; by adjusting the height of the feet one can tune in the bass response. Tune Audio is known for picking fancy colors for their creations; this pair was in a more sober black-wood-red color scheme and paired very well in terms of “looks” with the electronics, a complete set of Lamm amplifiers. These were the LL2.1 pre-amplifier, LP2 phono stage and ML2.2 single ended vacuum tube power amplifiers, good for 18Watts in pure class A. The sources were harvested by Hørning and his line of Sati electronics, a non upsampling DAC and his Transference Ultimate Zigma Record Player. All cabling was provided by Signal Projects, some huge black pythons power cables were laying on the ground.
On Saturday morning the room had no sound, I was told that ground loops were the issue. This is something of an experience, I had to come back and this happened towards the end of the show on Sunday. More issues, this time with the turntable which presented an abnormal wow and flutter. The Sati DAC might not be the latest in digital playback but still the sound of this system was like nothing else during the show. The fastest attack along with the clearest transients in a staggering performance of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from the Four Seasons (BIS records). On Dire Straits “You and Your Friend” I felt as I was attending one of those memorable “unplugged” shows Mtv was airing in the early nineties, with Knopfler’s voice right in my face and guitar strings vibrating in short distance from the sweat spot.
If you are wandering about the price and you live in the US, then don’t. Tune Audio has no US importer and I am not sure if you can order them from the UK, France or some other EU country were prices are in the 32.000 euro mark.
