Very close to the modern home of Helmuth Weber, surrounded by an idyllic garden setting, there is a smaller house graced by the rather inconspicuous name plate “Chiemsee Hif”i. Here the Audiaz speakers are being developed and measured, with cabinets mainly equipped with Accuton drivers, as well as elaborate Audiaz crossovers and cables. Unfortunately, I was denied to take a look at both the production and development as well as the workshop in the residential building, where Helmuth Weber assembles the Audiaz cables. But this surely isn’t going to be the last visit. Perhaps after a few trust-building measures – or perhaps after a longer cleanup?the more so as I had signed up for this visit at really short notice – I might come across the opportunity to take a look at the currently forbidden places for our readers.

All that remains is for me to give the Audiaz transducers in the studios of Chiemsee Hifi a listen. But that has been the actual reason for the visit anyway. For quite some time now, they have foregone the demonstration with vinyl records there. Helmuth Weber appreciates Esoteric CD players and also likes to use the same manufacturer’s streamer for the playback of Qobuz files. He pays special attention to the synchronization of the Esoterics with extremely high-quality clocks – mostly sourced directly from Japan. In this premier system, the signal is transferred to a passive Audiaz preamp and then to class A mono blocks from Pass, each delivering 160 watts. I can remember that a predecessor model left a lasting, extremely positive impression on me when I tested it well over ten years ago.

Since I am not familiar to the local system – apart from recalling rather vague memories of the Pass amps – and thus being only able to roughly assess the sonic capabilities of the Cadenza, I brought along my Chord Electronics HUGO 2 including 2go in my hand luggage, on whose 512 GB micro-SSD disk more than enough exciting music is to be found. Except for some particular digital copies of my analogue recordings, I would find most of it on Qobuz as well, but in my experiences up to now, a stream doesn't necessarily come close to the quality of a music file stored on a hard drive or disk. Besides that, I am very acquainted with the sound characteristics of the HUGO 2, which are not fundamentally different from those of the DAVE. Maybe it's because, to my ears, my small, black digital SWAT team fought bravely when compared to the bolide components in the system.