Unless you’ve experienced it, the actual scale of Munich’s High End audio show is nearly impossible to imagine. I recently received a that’s-all-she-wrote summary from the organizers, wherein they reported that the 2025 show encompassed 501 exhibitors representing nearly 1000 brands. Attendance topped 20,000. While those numbers are impressive, they don’t tell the whole story.
This was my fourth year attending High End Munich. For the first two years I found it extremely hard to get my bearings in the MOC event space. I’d walk about in confusion, distracted by one shiny, cool device after another. I’d wander into a great-sounding room, write down its coordinates, and then leave, intending to return later. Then I’d get waylaid in another great-sounding room, and instantly forget about the one I’d just left. It was an exercise in temporary ADHD. I was combat-ineffective.
In year three I got my bearings. I built a mental model of the MOC that actually made sense, and I was able to mentally bookmark rooms of interest without maxing out my CPU. That said, it still wasn’t hard to get turned around, and it was still easy to get overloaded.
Despite the rumor that the vinyl resurgence is starting to plateau, it seemed to me that there were more turntables at High End 2025 than in previous years. My guess is that 2024 marked a watershed year for retiring machinists. That could explain the proliferation of large, heavy turntables beautifully finished in polished chrome. At 65 years of age, the pension from the mill kicks in—and if the garage is already fitted out with an uncommonly large CNC machine, what else to do but start cranking out turntables? Every direction I looked, I saw large, heavy, polished-chrome turntables, some from established brands, but many from brands that were unfamiliar to me.
Transrotor’s stunning Metropolis FMD turntable
I wanted to cover them all, but I was frozen by indecision and time was of the essence. Since I was looking for news, I sauntered down to the main atrium to see what European Audio Team was showing.
This was a little like cheating. EAT always has something new on display at High End, and I was quite familiar with the company’s products, having recently reviewed the Fortissimo S turntable fitted with an F-Note arm. While I hoped that I’d be able to walk away with two new product leads for the price of one, I did way better and hit a gusher.
The EAT booth was a static display, which was actually quite clever—with turntables at shows, it’s more important to look and touch than it is to listen. The front part of the atrium is always exceptionally busy. There’s huge foot traffic, as you have to shuffle past the EAT and Pro-Ject display bottleneck to access the rest of the atrium. The first thing I saw upon entry was three large, brightly colored turntables—a potent antidote to the ubiquitous chrome elsewhere at the show, and an audacious design choice that stopped me in my tracks. I saw one yellow and one red Fortissimo turntable, and another in black just for contrast. With each ’table, the whole thing was brightly colored, not just the plinth. Platter, arm, plinth, motor, pulleys—all red, all yellow, all black.
As we were presenting Jozefina Lichtenegger, owner and CEO of European Audio Team, with a 2024 SoundStage! Network Product-of-the-Year award for the Fortissimo S and F-Note, I took the opportunity to ask what was new.
Lichtenegger noticed how my eyes kept straying to the red Fortissimo. “The leather that we use for the Fortissimo is new. It’s Ferrari leather. The same leather used in the cars.” I took a close look and ran my hands over the sides of the ’table. The leather was smooth, contiguous, utterly free of blemishes or imperfections, and beautifully applied.
“You can order the turntable in any color combination you wish,” she continued. “We can paint in any RAL color the customer chooses, and there are many leather colors available. The customer can choose, or I can assist with the design choice.” That got me thinking—red leather and a black plinth, topped with a chrome platter and tonearm. My stars, that would look hot.
Jozefina’s own Fortissimo in front of her painting entitled “Transsubstantiation”
EAT was displaying two other new products. First, and most interesting to me, was the E-Glo FB phono stage (€14,990, all prices in euros). This is an ambitious product. The E-Glo FB is a fully balanced, all-tube phono stage. It’s balanced from input right through to output. A phono cartridge is naturally balanced, with positive and actual negative legs—not just positive and ground—yet few phono stages take advantage of this built-in noise-reduction feature.
All-tube phono stages are complicated, and the audio industry realizes this. It’s harder to make a quiet tube phono stage, as tube circuits can easily inject noise, especially considering the heroic amounts of gain required to amplify the tiny signal generated by a cartridge. It’s far easier to build a quiet solid-state phono stage.
I first encountered EAT’s tube electronics when I reviewed their E-Glo S phono stage back in 2018. With its two 12AX7 tubes, the E-Glo S sounded rich and warm, yet fully fleshed-out and detailed. I loved it.
The new E-Glo FB is furious with tubes. There are four ECC88s and four ECC83s (a long-plate version of the 12AX7) generating 45dB of gain. Unlike the E-Glo S, which employs J-FETs in the final gain stage, the E-Glo FB uses a high-rent Lundahl step-up transformer in its moving-coil stage. There’s lots more going on inside—the E-Glo FB is built to a high standard, with much care in parts selection, and the power supply is sequestered to a separate, equal-sized chassis.
It’s a looker too. The glass envelopes surrounding the tubes can be illuminated in different colors. As with the E-Glo S, the new E-Glo FB can be fitted with wood cheeks in either black or Makassar veneer.
One step to the right of the E-Glo FB was the equally new F-Dur turntable, which retails for €8990 with an F-Note arm. The F-Dur presents as a stripped-down Fortissimo S turntable. It shares the dual-motor architecture of the larger EAT turntables, along with the larger-diameter platter, which is magnetically supported to take some of the weight off the bearing. The most obvious differentiator between the F-Dur and EAT’s top-line models is the finish. The matte stealth-fighter-black coating looks quite smart, contrasting nicely with the polished platter and chrome accents.
While I didn’t get to see it in the flesh at High End 2025, EAT announced the release of their new upmarket cartridge, the Jo N°10. I’ve been using a Jo N°8 for several years now, and its juicy, fleshed-out midrange and well-behaved top end continue to impress me. Where the Jo N°8 hits that sweet spot in the moving-coil pantheon with its boron cantilever and Shibata stylus, the Jo N°10 ups the EAT game with a diamond cantilever and a Micro Ridge stylus. The cosmetics are similar to those of the N°8, featuring a solid wood body. However, EAT has paid more attention to the finishing details, with a hand-applied logo and a real shellac coating.
At €7900, the Jo N°10 is certainly not cheap, but its stated compliance of 15μm/mN seems to indicate that it would be a perfect match for the company’s statement F-Note tonearm, and that’s probably the point.
This summer I’ll be heading to Vienna, Austria, to visit the European Audio Team and Pro-Ject headquarters. These two companies, which share the same facilities, are the beating heart, the headwaters of the vinyl universe. If you take a look at their respective websites, you’ll discover a breadth of turntables and other vinyl-related products, ranging from entry-level all-in-one turntables to full-on high-end audiophile versions. The vertical variety that these two companies offer is unique in audio, and I’m very much looking forward to investigating how it all comes together. I’ll report back on what I find.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
