High End Vienna is the most important hi-fi show in the European calendar, and this year it runs from 4 to 7 June 2026 at the Austria Center Vienna. We are there on the floor, listening to the rooms that matter and the products our clients will be asking about over the coming year. This piece is our running pick of the highlights, written from the show itself and updated as the days unfold — so do check back, because there is more to come.
Ø Audio — horn-loading done properly
The room that genuinely stopped us in our tracks belonged to Ø Audio, the Norwegian maker whose flagship horn-loaded loudspeaker turns a lot of received wisdom on its head. The scale of soundstage it produces, and the almost limitless size any one instrument can occupy within it, is simply bigger than a conventional tweeter-and-woofer design can manage. Refined, open, huge, dynamic and extended — it left a real impression.
We have written a fuller piece on why this approach works, with Daniel’s first impressions straight from the room: QVST horn-loading and the Ø Audio speaker design.
Grimm Audio — a new monoblock, and a Vienna exclusive
Grimm Audio chose Vienna to debut the PA1, their first dedicated monoblock power amplifier — a Class AB design that sounded effortless, open and detailed without ever becoming fatiguing. The surprise was what it was driving: a prototype pair of passive loudspeakers Grimm have developed, drawing on the detailed measurements behind their acclaimed LS1. It is very much a Vienna exclusive, and one that may well reach production. The whole system was fed by the Grimm MU2 streaming preamplifier and sounding beautiful.
Read our full take, including Daniel’s first listen: the Grimm Audio PA1 monoblock power amplifier.
OJAS — a refreshing antidote to audiophile obsession
Day two opened with the OJAS room, the project of the Brooklyn-based designer and audio engineer Devon Turnbull, and it was one of the most refreshing things we have seen in a long time. Where so much of high-end audio can get lost in splitting hairs over the last fractional detail, this system set all of that aside and concentrated on the thing that actually matters — the sheer pleasure of listening to music. The build has a handmade, almost home-built character; immaculate fit and finish are deliberately not the point, and that is precisely what makes it such fun.
The system paired an analogue reel-to-reel machine and one of the reference Technics turntables with what looked like hand-built preamplifiers, driving a pair of large two-way loudspeakers — a substantial subwoofer-style enclosure with a single big paper-coned driver, topped by a horn array. The effect was open, unforced and genuinely joyful: a welcome reminder that, for all the engineering, the point of any system is the music it lets you enjoy.
TAD — hyper-realistic, and hard to walk away from
Some rooms you visit; others you have to make yourself leave. Daniel came out of the TAD room having stayed far longer than the schedule allowed and struggling to find the words for it. The one that kept coming back was hyper-realistic — not clinical or analytical, but real in the best possible way, with voices and instruments placed in front of you with an almost unnerving solidity.
That realism is no accident. TAD — Technical Audio Devices — began life in 1975 as a project inside Pioneer to build reference monitors for the world’s best recording studios, and its early drivers ended up in rooms such as AIR Studios and Capitol Records. The company has made its own beryllium drivers since long before beryllium became fashionable, and its signature CST coaxial driver sits the tweeter and midrange on a single acoustic axis for a remarkably coherent, lifelike sound. Hearing it in Vienna was a reminder of where that studio pedigree leads: a system that simply gets out of the way of the recording.
Audio Group Denmark — Børresen and Aavik, dazzling and almost flawless
The Audio Group Denmark room paired Børresen’s sculpted floorstanders — the C3 you see here — with Aavik electronics, and it drew the rarer, more considered kind of reaction from Daniel: not unqualified rapture, but real admiration with eyes open. Incredibly clear, incredibly precise, incredibly involving and incredibly beautiful, it came within a whisker of a clean sweep. If there is a caveat, it is an unusual one — it may be too precise for some tastes, a non-issue for most listeners but the sort of thing a few will notice. The other honest note was a fairly small sweet spot: move off to one side and the stereo image snaps with it, though the tonal beauty holds up wherever you sit. A stunningly capable system, and one well worth hearing with your own ears before forming a view.
Audio Group Denmark is the Danish house behind a family of closely related brands, all run out of Aalborg by the designer Michael Børresen and Lars Kristensen: Børresen for the loudspeakers, Aavik for the electronics and Ansuz for the cables and tuning. They share a common engineering DNA, which is part of why a full Børresen-and-Aavik system hangs together so convincingly — every piece is voiced as part of the same whole.
Technics — and a bit of our own news
The Technics room gave us the perfect excuse to share something we are genuinely pleased about: Hidden Home Technology is now a Technics dealer. That means the whole range — from the iconic direct-drive decks that defined a generation of DJs through to the reference turntables built for fuss-free, no-compromise listening — can now be bought through us. The deck pictured here, a reference direct-drive turntable in brushed silver, is exactly the sort of thing we mean: beautifully made, satisfyingly heavy, and engineered to spin a record at exactly the right speed and hold it there.
Technics is Panasonic’s hi-fi brand, founded in 1965 in Osaka. It quite literally invented the direct-drive turntable — the SP-10 of 1970 was the world’s first — and the SL-1200 that followed in 1972 went on to become the most recognisable record player ever made, as at home in a DJ booth as a listening room. After a pause, Technics relaunched in 2014 with a renewed focus on high-end engineering, and the turntables today carry that same direct-drive heritage. Whether it is nostalgia for the vinyl and DJ era or simply the easiest route to serious analogue sound, it is a brand we are proud to offer.
Dynaudio — the new Confidence range, beautifully human
Daniel came out of the Dynaudio room genuinely taken with the new Confidence range — the natural-oak floorstander you see here. Across the board it was impressive, but the word that stuck was “human”: where the Audio Group Denmark room dazzled with sheer precision, this leaned a touch warmer and more natural, the kind of sound that draws you in rather than holds you at arm’s length. Best of all was the frequency integration top to bottom — nothing sounded dragged apart or separated, just one coherent whole, which is exactly what we listen for. If there was a caveat it was an honest one: it may have been a fraction hard in places, though with different electronics, cables and an untreated show room there is no telling what to credit or blame. A system well worth hearing properly — ideally in a treated room with familiar kit, which is precisely how we would set it up for you.
Dynaudio is one of the great Danish loudspeaker houses, founded in 1977 in Skanderborg and still building its own drive units in-house — right down to the magnets and voice coils — with the signature soft-dome tweeters it has refined for nearly fifty years. The Confidence range sits at the top of its hi-fi line, pairing the latest Esotar tweeter with the company’s own woofers, and it is voiced as a complete, coherent instrument rather than a collection of clever parts.
Marten — the brand-new Dexter, and the impossible made to look easy
Marten chose Vienna to launch its brand-new Dexter series, and it was one of the rooms Daniel did not want to leave — he came out and went straight to Marten’s owner and designer to say so. The verdict was almost a contradiction: fast and dynamic, starting and stopping on a sixpence, yet beautifully delicate and poised with it. The bass was rich and almost plump, but never slow — full of texture at the bottom end, open and airy above, and the very opposite of fatiguing without ever tipping into bright or forward. It is the thing high-end audio is supposed not to be able to do: detail, presence and dynamics on the one hand, richness, warmth and fullness on the other, all at once. Absolutely stunning was the word — and it was the larger of the Dexter floorstanders doing it.
Marten is the Swedish house that has handcrafted its loudspeakers in Sweden for decades, naming its ranges after jazz greats — Coltrane, Mingus, Parker and now Dexter. The Dexter series is the newest of them, unveiled at this very show, and it brings Marten’s flagship thinking into more real-world rooms: a one-inch pure diamond tweeter derived from the cost-no-object Coltrane Supreme Extreme, a ceramic midrange, carbon-fibre bass drivers on the larger models and a new three-layer M-Core cabinet. Every pair is internally wired with Jorma cable — which is why this was billed as the Marten and Jorma room — and the speakers Daniel heard wore the new True Grain Oak finish that is exclusive to the range. Feeding them was a system to match: a TechDAS AirForce 20 turntable, Gold Note electronics and an Innuos NazaréNET audiophile network switch.
The Dexter range is available through us — here is our full guide to it: the Marten Dexter loudspeaker range.
More to come
There is still another day and a half of the show to go, and we will keep adding the standout rooms and products as we hear them. If anything here catches your eye and you would like to talk it through for your own system, you are always welcome to get in touch — we audition by appointment at our Bath showroom.
