Not An Audiophile – The Podcast featuring podcast episodes from the High End HiFi Show – 2025 Munich. Full interview with HiFi celebrity, Laurence Dickie who goes deep into speaker engineering and design. Also The good, bad and ugly in brands and sound. High End still offers affordability for everyone and more.
Podcast transcripts below – Episode 029
TRANSCRIPT
S2 EP029 Laurence Dickie Interviewed & High End Munich 2025, the good bad and ugly.
Andrew Hutchison Burning, I feel, is the wrong word, but running in of the mechanical parts. I feel less that capacitors have to run in, but the thing is… There are no measurable changes, is the thing. Okay, somebody says, well, the suspensions have had time to soften up.
Laurence Dickie Say, well, if the softer suspension was what we needed, we’d have put a softer suspension. And it’s the same with, okay, amplifier, running in, what’s changing? Well, the resistor values have changed a little bit. Well, again, if a 1.1k resistor was the right value, we’d have used it.
Andrew Hutchison And welcome back to episode 29, season two, Not an Audiophile, the podcast, and today it’s the Munich High End 2025 show roundup. And we do an interview with Laurence Dickie, or we did one at the show, and today we play it, and he proceeds to set me straight on a number of things that I thought were maybe true, probably true. And of course, we round up the show, the good, the bad, the ugly.
There was some fantastic systems. There was some fantastic affordable systems, and there was some dreadful music. This episode of Not an Audiophile, the podcast, is sponsored by the subwoofer people, Harbottle Audio.
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Oh, Munich High End 2025.
Why do people, YouTube influencer type people, have it in for hi-fi shows? I mean, it was just, it’s just a pleasure. It’s amazing. It’s a great city, great show, great equipment.
Lots of, you know, great people having fun times listening to and looking at a lot of interesting equipment, new stuff, old, catching up with friends. I’m not sure what’s not to like. Oh, that’s right.
The music. Oh dear. Please, exhibitors, just stop.
It’s just terrible. But moving right along, the good, the bad and the ugly of the show. I was absolutely gobsmacked, amazed, all of those amazing type terms with the a, the a Acapella horns.
I mean, I might be one of the first who was going on about how good they were, but they seem to have gained some momentum and other people now realise, you know, how stunning they are. The music sort of washes over you. It’s utterly effortless.
It sort of hangs in space. Um, so much sort of inner detail. What a terrible term.
But, you know, there’s this information laid bare, but not in a laid bare kind of way. It’s just warm and nice. And I don’t know, they were playing proper music.
Well, you know, I consider proper music. Brick in the wall, part one. At least it’s a song and it has a melody.
And, um, oh, I’ve never heard it sound anything like that. Just, just amazing. So number one sound at the show, a Acapella by a fair margin, most expensive system at the show, a Acapella by a fair margin, uh, four and a half million euro, which is a new record for my ears.
Um, I’ve never heard anything like that before in that price range, but unlike a lot of equipment at the show where you go, hmm, it’s, it looks cool. There’s lots of boxes and lots of, uh, fancy cables and, uh, cable support. And, uh, but it sounds kind of, um, ho hum, uh, the a Acapella is, is stunning.
So as an exercise in, can we make a better audio system if we throw a lot of money and great ideas at it? The answer is yes. A Acapella have pulled that off, but at a much more affordable price point and with some local content, uh, local for us, at least, uh, uh, Mark Dohmann’s room, his turntable, some Italian tube amplifiers, which I annoyingly have forgotten the brand of, and yet I knew them at one point. Um, and Cessaro horn loudspeakers, um, which are also Italian.
Um, I’ve never heard a piano sound quite so much like a piano. Uh, that’s what they were playing when I was in there. And the problem with this show is that there is so much to see and do.
You don’t spend half an hour in a room. And if you do, you do it at risk of missing something else somewhere else. Although maybe I should have spent longer there because, um, so many rooms, uh, are a little, you know, they’re a little ho-hum and some of the comments on our YouTube videos on, um, Not An Audiophile Podcast YouTube channel.
Some of the comments are like, oh, it’s just a show of shiny bling and snake oil. Well, I don’t know about the snake oil, the shiny bling, yes. Um, but, uh, they’ve got a point and that is that some systems, you know, might be half a million dollars or euros or a million dollars.
Um, and they really aren’t, you know, they’re not, yeah, not great value for money, uh, money not well spent. It’s not bad sound, just not good enough, I would suggest. Uh, and speaking of bad sound, Wilson Audio and D’Agostino, that room, wow, um, what a disappointment.
Uh, not so much disappointment with the system because I didn’t get to hear it. It was probably amazing, but, um, disappointment that some auctioneer slash used car salesman just blabbed and blabbed and blabbed about how good the system was going to be when they played it, but he never got around to playing it, playing it, at least not before I, uh, departed the room. So that was, uh, that was a disappointment.
Um, the other room that was not so good, Tidal, uh, Tidal loudspeakers. A lot of people go on and on about them as if they’re, um, uh, astounding. Uh, they certainly look amazing.
And, uh, the, uh, Bugatti equipment that was in that room on static display also was, I mean, just probably the, well, for me, probably the best looking pieces of equipment at the show, but we didn’t hear it. But the, um, uh, the Tidal loudspeakers that were playing were thoroughly, um, unimpressive. Sorry.
Um, just dull and uninteresting. And there’s a mid range weirdness that, uh, I couldn’t quite understand, uh, at that price. Uh, now affordable equipment, there’s lots of it at the show.
Unfortunately, a lot of it is not wired up. It’s static display. Um, but, uh, the, uh, the highlight perhaps as far as genuinely affordable gear was the Wharfedale, the new Evo five series floor standards with audio lab powering them, uh, was very, I mean, it was, you know, you’re not going to say it’s stunning, right? But it was very, very enjoyable to listen to.
And of course, thoroughly affordable. A few doors away was Totem Acoustics, uh, from Canada. And, uh, for me quite a bit better sound, not dramatically better, but definitely, uh, they were playing some orchestral sort of symphonic type stuff, stuff, well, music.
And, um, oh, it was, it was breathtaking. It was very, very good in typical, typical Totem fashion, just clean, sweet, musical, easy to listen to. Um, I don’t know, just, just an utter delight.
Um, not sure why Totem’s not spoken about more. Also great rooms, Esoteric Audio and Marten loudspeakers, uh, was, was, was a pleasure. Uh, we’re jumping away, obviously from the affordable there to the, uh, definitely not so affordable, although compared with other systems at the show, I guess this one was only a couple of hundred grand, right? Uh, Total DAC also amazing and TAD, um, genuinely a delight as well.
So that’s, that’s, that we listened to lots of other equipment, to be honest, most of probably isn’t worth mentioning because it was good, but not great. You really have to go and listen yourself. Um, and I would also say as a caveat to those rooms that I didn’t get excited about that different music at a different time with a different amount of people and a different amount of ambient noise, and maybe on a different day when they maybe tweaked the system a bit or change something to improve it, uh, could well add up to a more enjoyable demonstration.
I guess it’s a, it’s a moving feast in the sense that, that, that, that show in the sense that I would guess, and knowing from my own exhibiting experience, the system can improve over the day simply because you try things that evening to improve it and sure enough, get a better result for the next day. Um, show overall, well, probably the best thing, uh, is what we’re going to play now. And that’s a chat with Laurence Dickie.
Uh, he, uh, sets me straight on a few things that I thought were, uh, truths about audio and, um, he’s, uh, an enthusiastic and generous, uh, lover of the, uh, hi-fi industry. Uh, he loves making great equipment and giving people pleasure listening to music at home and, uh, and, uh, it’s quite clear from his, uh, demeanour. So, um, without any further ado, Laurence,
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So visit StereoNet.com and join up today. So we’re delighted at Not An Audio Fault today to, uh, to speak to Laurence Dickie. He says he’s the most famous loudspeaker designer.
Andrew Hutchison I wouldn’t say anything. And, uh, and I actually, in my, um, research of your career, which I’ve done for me, now I haven’t, but I have looked around and you, as much as you like to make light of certain things that you’ve done, you’ve actually done some incredible work. I mean, like very, like cutting edge, lots of research.
And, and I guess, um, I mean, what I really want to talk to you a bit, talk to you about today is the boring things like cables and cone materials and box enclosure materials, which, because you, I mean, the shape of the, of your current range, the Vivids is very organic. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s that shape for a reason.
Laurence Dickie.Ultimately, uh, the shape of the box around the high frequency units in particular, yes, uh, does have a real significance. The effect it has on diffraction and interference, you know, it’s important. And the smooth shape around the tweeter is essential.
Whether you carry that smooth shape on around the rest of the box is a little bit more, uh, artistic licence. Yes. So less, less critical at lower frequencies.
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, like you can take the gear, which has this, uh, very organic single swirl on the top. In fairness, that could be a zigzag.
Laurence Dickie.It could be a zigzag. I was going to say you could just hacksaw it off, but. Oh, no, no, no, it does actually do something.
It’s one of your tapered, your patent, not patented, maybe, is it’s a tapered, uh, it’s sort of, uh, residence reducing cap enclosure. Exponentially tapered. That’s the word I was looking for.
Laurence Dickie.Exponentially tapered, yes. Because the original came up, came out in the Northwest, uh, and it works very well just sticking it directly on the back of a driver. But the, uh, as it were inventive step with, uh, with gear was to combine the taper tube with bass reflex, which, uh, we certainly hadn’t done before.
And that thing was actually patented because, um, that combination getting, uh, just the right taper, which absorbs the resonances, but doesn’t, uh, take out, take away the port, uh, energy was, yeah, that was actually quite a step forward. Yeah, so, so, yeah, just for clarification. So that, um, exponentially, da, da, da, da, that is actually the whole enclosure volume inside, the reflex enclosure.
Yeah, and in the, in the gear, yeah, the whole, the whole chamber volume for the base units is what you see. And then at the, at the top, it blends smoothly into this exponential, curled exponential horn. Now, as I say, it doesn’t have to be curled.
And in fact, in our later products, the Kayas, uh, there’s a sort of hairpin bend at the top of the cabinet where the, the, uh, so there is, yeah, but it’s still in there. The exponential taper is still in there. It’s ever so simple, but it really works.
.I mean, it’s, it’s for the sake of an open and honest conversation. Let’s face it. It has to look good as well.
Laurence Dickie Look, there’s no question, uh, a loudspeaker is a sculptural object. Whereas really all the other bits of electronics and stuff, you could hide away if you felt that way in time. But clearly the speaker has to be more or less visible.
Having said all that, of course, with custom install, which is a completely different world, and there is, you know, people in fact want to make their speakers invisible. I just don’t get that myself. Well, for me, a speaker is, you know, it’s part of the joy of it.
Well, it’s a, it’s a furnishing item to some degree. It’s a piece of, uh, it’s a piece of art, you know, and yours, yours obviously take that to a level much higher than most. And I’ll be honest, they do divide opinion.
Laurence Dickie It’s always been the same with our products. Going right back to, uh, mid, the mid-naughties, uh, when we were first exhibiting the B1, uh, in the UK. Yes.
And I, uh, in the, in the morning we had this Italian lass who came in and she fell to her knees and started stroking the speaker going, oh, bella, which was really lovely. It is. But then later in the same day, on the same day, uh, these two women came in and one said to the other, in a not discreet way, says, my God, they’re ugly.
I could never have those in my home. It’s a world of contrast, isn’t it? Yeah, really. No, but I’ll tell you on that day, the worst thing that happened was I was stood outside the room as you do to just get a breather.
And these two, two guys in anoraks walked by and paused briefly, looked into the room and then one says to the other, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. I thought, no, that’s rude. Well, that’s actually rather bizarre because I realised what they were looking at because, I mean, there actually is, I don’t think there’s any other, there’s been a few curvaceous loudspeakers over the years.
They’ve never quite pulled it off. No, there are more and more. And I think when I saw yours first, I’m like, oh, I’ll see how this, you know, how will this go? But having heard them over the years, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, they do perform very well.
And there is, and there is, well, they do. And they’ve got a, I mean, they have that kind of hear through sort of sound that we, I did see one video where you’re talking about colouration. And I mean, you’ve clearly reduced that, even though it’s vivid, it’s vivid, the sound is kind of vivid because there is no colouration.
Laurence Dickie I mean, that’s the way I feel about it. I’ve always drawn that analogy with the window onto the performance. And, you know, obviously the purpose of the speaker is to give you a window onto the performance of the artist.
We are just an in-between stage. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. You do want to add, I always feel there needs to be a pleasant colour, though.
I mean, you wouldn’t, you don’t want a studio monitor. Some people do. I personally, I want, I want a sort of a… Now, you also work in the pro audio world.
Laurence Dickie Yes, I do. So do you, you see the clash of the business-like nature of pro audio? Yeah, look, there’s a clash. It is a clash in the business side of the thing.
There is, or should be, a huge overlap in terms of actual engineering. Yes. Sort of, you know, barking up the same tree.
I guess there is, is there? I mean, really, acoustics don’t change. But the priorities in the design do, I suppose. Yeah, the difference, of course, in pro audio, and it depends, you know, whether you’re talking about front of house, you know, large PA.
Laurence Dickie Yes, yeah. Or studio monitor professional. Studio monitors are very much big high-five.
And in fact, in fact, when I started, when I left Bowers, it was because I wanted to get into making studio monitors. The drivers that I developed in that time before joining Philip in South Africa, I designed with the intention of bringing the Nautilus-type quality of sound to studios’ levels of sound. But I also really had a fascination with large-scale sound reinforcement.
Yeah, it’s all well and good. I mean, one geezer sitting there tapping his foot going, nice. But if you can blow away a stadium, yes, oh yeah.
I mean, that’s the real deal, isn’t it? In the same way as that emotion that you get in a big stadium just from having a performance or a band there, and the whole crowd is getting off. But to be responsible for the sound. Yeah, yeah, no, it’s a buzz.
Laurence Dickie And, you know, obviously, those kids don’t give a damn, but you can sit there saying, that’s my tweeter, that is. I think they kind of do, in a way. I mean, if it was dreadful, you know, and some, I have to, I mean, we could talk about pro audio more than domestic in some ways, because I have strong feelings that pro audio, fidelity-wise, is it just me, or has it gone backwards slightly? Because it’s more convenient to make lighter boxes and things? Or is that going too far? No, no, I think that’s going too far.
As always, the main thrust for, you know, the… We’re talking front of house, not studio audience here. Yeah, exactly, yeah, no, sure. The most important factors are, you know, ease of use.
People want to be able to get in and out of the venue quickly. Smaller and lighter. Well, that’s never been better, has it? No, no, it’s great.
Laurence Dickie The point is that sound quality tends to come a little bit further down the list of priorities. Oh, directivity, that’s super important. Yes, yeah.
Pattern control, being able to put the sound where you want it and not where you don’t want it. Yes. And those tend to be perhaps a little bit more important than just the pure fidelity.
Well, that’s perhaps what I’m referring to, is that that directionality, directivity has been improved dramatically, hasn’t it? Yeah, yeah, it’s really done. Line arrays are very effective in that respect. But, you know, we audio engineers do try to sneak the quality in.
Well, of course you do. And, no, actually… Obviously, it depends on the engineer as well, but I think modern PAs… So the line array is… Pretty good, yeah. You’ve got a good line array.
I’ll blame my local venue then, more than the equipment. Then I’ll blame the engineering team.
I was just talking to Geoff at Heynow Hi-Fi about his latest installation, another dome and turntable.
This time, one with a SuperTrak Blackbird arm and a Mutech Hayabusa cartridge. Motorcyclists everywhere are wondering how that could be. Blackbird arm, Hayabusa cartridge.
Anyhow, then he said he was going back to the store to listen to some records on the Helix 2 in-store unit. I thought, do you ever get sick of listening to records? But then maybe not playing them back through the Fischer & Fischer speakers that are crafted from slate. Anyhow, enough discussion of Geoff’s antics.
Back to the show. There is a temptation with line arrays to try and get away with, effectively, just a tweeter and a cone-based mid. Yes.
Laurence Dickie Where really, you do need to have something in between. A line array should be a three-way box, at least, to make it work properly. But there are far too many two-way boxes.
And the compromises that are made by having a compression driver, just one compression driver going all the way from, I don’t know, 1.5kHz up to 20kHz. And then a pair of 12kHz going up to… There are too many compromises. So, yeah, that is a bit of a problem.
Yeah, okay. That’s just economics. I’d say it’s more my narrow band of experience.
Coming back to hi-fi, though. So if you were, say, in 10 or 20 years’ time, when you’re not working anymore and you’re relaxed. I can’t even imagine that.
Laurence Dickie In your little humble provincial French chalet. I like this dream. You know, maybe it’s not a dream.
But, or you’re, you know, I don’t know, you’re in Durban on the beach. I don’t know where you are. That’s much more possible.
But the point is, you’re relaxed. You’ve sold the business for gazillions of dollars. And your brain is still, of course, ticking over.
Yeah. And you feel like you want to build a pair of speakers for yourself. Yeah.
A pair of loudspeakers for your own personal use. Is it asking too much to have you sort of allude to what they might be? Because, I mean, you’ve done, you’ve listened to so much stuff. You design so much stuff.
You must have personal preferences. You know, that’s kind of already is it. That’s what it is.
Laurence Dickie That’s the embodiment of my personal state of the art. So something that is capable of playing very big, very loudly, very cleanly. Yeah, absolutely.
At the moment, I can’t think of a better product, if I’m honest. I can make it bigger. You could make it bigger.
That’s really it. That was the big step between our former top of the range, the G1S. Yes.
And mine was, well, initially, it was just making it bigger. Well, you did that. And in fact, almost incidentally, we ended up making it better as well, which is quite nice.
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to say, I haven’t really, I don’t feel I’ve heard them at their best. I’ve heard them here last year or the year before.
You had them in a small room in the halls, and they made a very nice sound. But the room was almost no bigger than the loudspeakers. And is that a problem? So is that the G1S or the Moya? No, no, the Moya.
Laurence Dickie Oh, yeah, that was here last year. Yeah, you’re right. It was one of these little listening booths.
Yeah, I mean, it’s not, it’s certainly not ideal. And the best setup I’m aware of at the moment is with Bill Parrish, our US distributor. He has a beautiful listening room.
It’s about, I don’t know, 10 metres by seven. Yes. Probably about three and a half tall.
It’s an ideal room. It’s a perfect space for that. It’s a really lovely space.
Laurence Dickie And he’s got them set up so well, yeah. And do you have thoughts? What sort of front end do you need to get the best out? They’re not, they’re quite sensitive, I presume. Yeah, they are reasonably.
So they don’t, in theory, they don’t need them. No, well, that’s the irony, isn’t it? The bigger the speaker, the less amplifier. People obviously have this instinctive assumption that you’re going to need a big amp, big speaker, big amp, of course, it’s the other way around.
So yeah, ironically, the Moya probably get a pretty reasonable amount of sound with a single-ended 25-watt triode or something like that. That’s kind of, well, that or you could put a Musical Fidelity A1 on there or something. And actually, it would play quite loud.
Yeah, but in fact… Plus, the amplifier could warm the room up if you’re in a cold climate. That happens. Yeah, but in fact, of course, people end up putting, I don’t know, 800 or 1200 amps on these things and then it rots, of course.
Laurence Dickie I mean, it’s like… Unlimited headroom. Wow, yeah, absolutely. Or club-like sound levels, which is fun.
You can have a party with a pair of Moya, for sure. They actually… Back in the 90s, when I say I was quite interested in larger sound systems, I was still at Bowers & Wilkins and we were into the whole rave scene in the UK and putting on parties. And I had a funny little sound system, which was built with Bowers & Wilkins drivers and the bass engine.
Which you found lying around the factory. Very kindly. My boss, Robert, was quite supportive in this, because he also thought the idea of having B&W Pro would be rather fun.
So anyway, we took the 12-inch drivers from 801s and stuck them in the ends of cardboard tubes and stacked them up like barrels. And it was actually quite a nice sound system. It was never a loud sound system, but it had a hi-fi quality.
Anyway, I’ve never forgotten the sound that we had with that. And whilst it wasn’t the Root to Moya, the Root to Moya is well-recorded in other places, but having assembled this thing with eight bass drivers in it, I thought, yeah, actually, that’s kind of reminiscent of that PA we built back in… Well, literally 30 years ago. And indeed, it has some of that effortless bottom-end quality, even at sort of club levels.
And it’s fun, you know, that’s the thing about this business. You never forget. We got you on video saying exactly that the other day.
And I mean, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, there’s all kinds of fun in this business, but I mean, listening to music and having it sound like a band, having that sense of scale. As much as I love LS3-5As, I mean, for what they do in a small space at home in an intimate moment, late at night, they are not, they can’t do, they can’t make real music, not really.
Laurence DickieNot even the sense of scale of a cello or something, really. We must never forget that a decent tune will sound good even if you play it on a music box. But I mean, that’s the power of the art, if you wish.
But the experience of the texture of the instruments and indeed the scale of the performance. And that’s the other thing about Moya, which it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it kind of did anyway. It’s this perception of the scale of the auditorium, obviously for some acoustic recording, that you get a sense of space.
And the weird thing, and people elsewhere have made this observation, I’m certainly not the first, but when you sort out the bottom end of a sound system, weirdly, it sorts out the perspective of the whole range. So it actually places the higher frequencies in the environment. It’s a weird old thing.
It does, in my experience. I could only agree, but luckily. I don’t wish to argue with you.
But yeah, that is a thing, isn’t it? You get the bass right and then the rest follows. But is that a brain perception thing? Is that something going on in the acoustics of the space? I think, no, I mean, it’s an acoustic thing. To hear a large space, you need to hear low frequencies.
They’re affected by the dimensions of the auditorium. Will affect lower and lower frequencies as the space increases. And I guess part of the difficulty of creating a so-called live experience with a hi-fi system is that dynamics and that scale of sound, which you really can only get in a bigger room, I suppose.
We all know when you walk into an auditorium and they’re either just playing the backing music to get before the gig starts. And straight away, there’s a sense of A, there’s a sense of the sense of space of the acoustics. There’s a long decay time, but a controlled one.
But then there’s that bottom end, that genuinely deep ease also in the bass. Which is clearly what you tried to get with Moya. There is an interesting thing with, I’m here thinking of classical concerts.
Laurence Dickie Before the orchestra actually starts playing and in particular, if they’ve got quite a bouncy, hollow stage or some performers are on risers or boxes and they’ll drop a music stand or just shuffle their chairs or something. They’ll make a deep noise. And that’s just like that, somebody dropping a programme out of it.
And you hear the way that the sound reverberates in the space. And even before the band started playing, you get a feel for the space. Somebody coughs over there and you just know the environment that you’re in.
And it’s all a bit special, isn’t it? Well, it’s special because I guess you can’t experience it almost any other way. And that’s what hi-fi can’t do. But getting back to your dream speaker system, which you’ve already built.
But let’s say you had to build a smaller one. In your B&W days, you must have experimented with cabinet materials a bit and I guess comb materials, but I’m not sure that you had much to do with the choice of Kevlar. Although… No, no, Kevlar preceded me.
Did you quite get along with that? No, I’m quite adamant about this. I believe that…