The presentation of our new MU2 music streamer with built-in DAC at the High End Munich show was a great succes. Many visitors congratulated us with the massive stereo image, controlled low end, and overall ease of listening. Often we were given a thumbs up and big smile when people left the room.
Jaap Veenstra and Martijn ten Napel of Dutch online magazine Alpha Audio made video reviews of the show (in English) and visited our room twice. It’s clear that they were blown away. You can find their response to the MU2 sound in their first day report (at 7’24”) and especially in their third day report (at 16’15”), after they returned. Jaap also did a video interview about the MU2 with Eelco Grimm.
The most asked question in our room was about the playback system we used. Since the MU2 has analog outputs, we preferred to not use our LS1 system since that digitizes analog sources. The LS1 sounds really great on its analog inputs, but we wanted to present the MU2 as a DAC without further conversions (and LS1 users should buy the MU1 instead anyway…).
Unfortunately it turned out very difficult to find an alternative setup. The rooms at High End Munich are not free of room mode problems and we feared for lengthy setup sessions. Our SB1 motion feedback subwoofer is much less sensitive to room mode problems and we are spoiled by its extremely tight bass rendering.
Eventually we decided to assemble a passive first order crossover to combine SB1’s with our treasured Pawel PA-1, a passive two way monitor of 35 years (!) old from Pawel Acoustics. It has a very special foam/aluminium sandwich Podszus-Görlich woofer and a 3/4” Hiquphon tweeter. The stereo image rendering of this old gem is spectacular thanks to a very good time response, but it lacks bass and SPL. With the help of our SB1 below 150 Hz however it became an impressive 3-way system that proved very well capable to demonstrate the special qualities of the Major DAC in the MU2.
You can imagine how proud we were when Harry Pawel himself came listening on the first day of the show – someone must have told him that his old and famous design was being used. He was so happy with the sound that he came back a few times with friends. Thank you Harry, for making such a wonderful loudspeaker.
