On the day before High End 2025 officially began, in a cool, reclaimed, hipster-infused industrial building across the street from the Munich Order Center, a bunch of audio companies, all of them heavy hitters, were presenting, well, I don’t know what exactly, as almost all of the presentations were in German. I’d catch the odd word, but it wasn’t of much use.
This was essentially the kickoff party for High End 2025 in Munich, ostensibly fronted, according to the invitation, by AVM, YG Acoustics, and Siltech. We had heard about this being the introduction of YG Acoustics’ new statement loudspeaker, the Gemini. When we arrived, the entire system was covered so we couldn’t see or hear it right off the bat.
We were first herded like buffalo into a room with a PowerPoint presentation on the boil. This, it seemed, was a preview of every new product that was going to be introduced during the show from a select group of companies. All prices are in US dollars or euros.
I spent much of the time crowd-watching. The room was packed with a homogeneous group of balding, middle-aged males, many coughing and obviously contagious, some nodding off to sleep. The youngest person in the room was my colleague Matt Bonaccio, who is less than half my age. We bring Matt along to figure out the trains.
I caught presenters from WiiM, Kimber Kable, and Canton, who, Matt confirmed (his German is quite decent, which enhances his value to our team), is a brand now entering into a partnership called Lifestyle Audio Design.
ATC’s Ben Lilly presented in English, filling the audience in on the new SCM20ASL active two-way, and also announcing the opening of a new production facility, located just a few minutes away from ATC’s existing offices and factory. This doubles the British brand’s capacity.
Up next was a representative from Japanese headphone manufacturer Final, who introduced us to the new DX6000 open-back headphones. The diaphragm is made from one continuous piece of magnesium. I did not catch much else. Also brand-new are the A10000 in-ear monitors, which feature diamond diaphragms and are available in a Collector’s Edition. These look very nice and ferociously expensive.
Stenheim announced their new Alumine subwoofer, which looks like a big-ass box in the photo, with a 1200-Watt amplifier. It’s very clever inside—the isobaric design means it may well be smaller than it looks in pictures. I’ll have to look into this later.
Pro-Ject Audio Systems’ Heinz Lichtenegger took the podium next, and announced something in his cheery, enthusiastic manner, but he spoke in German so I caught none of it. I heard plattenspieler many times, so I have no doubt that he had much to tell that would be of interest to me. I’ll have to catch up with him during the show.
Probably much to Heinz’s consternation, the German turntable brand Thiele followed next. The Thiele ’table on display was one heck of a gingerbread confection, with lots going on, including a unique pivoting tonearm that seems to maintain a consistently accurate tracking angle. Interpreting using his rudimentary German, Matt said they’re introducing a passive damping base. I’m not familiar with this brand, but I think I need to correct that.
I’m making light of my discomfiture, but I did get some value out of this presentation. I saw a bunch of new products that I’m going to check out over the next few days.
The actual reason we headed over to this shindig was to check out the new YG Acoustics / AVM / Sitlech supersystem. While the principals were presenting this system, the room was so crowded that I couldn’t get in, so I grabbed a beer instead. As the presentation ended, beer and I went inside for a look and listen.
This event was the second day that the pair of Gemini speakers were actually playing, so this was essentially its world premiere.
Holy hell—the Gemini is a massive chunk of metal. It’s over seven feet tall with metal polished to an almost-gloss finish. I followed up with Duncan Taylor of YG Acoustics, and it turns out this finish is nickel plating on top of the company’s traditional aluminum. Oh boy, is this finish luxurious. The Gemini continues with YG’s general architecture: large, discrete, dense metal blocks assembled in mirror-image fashion around a centrally located tweeter.
There are three versions of the Gemini. The system on display was the Gemini XB, with the bottom-mounted woofer driven by a Bel Canto amplifier. The Gemini is also available as a fully passive speaker, and the Gemini Live version is fully active. The passive Gemini retails for $850,000 per pair, the XB for $30,000 more.
The Gemini is a five-way system, with a massive external crossover that has separate layers for each driver. The speaker connections are also five-way.
The construction of the speaker cabinet is extremely complex. The walls are constructed in three layers—an aluminum sandwich with a filling of a proprietary visco-elastic material. The baffle and back plate are 3.5″ thick, and there’s great attention paid to internal damping via strategically filled cavities.
Cables were from Siltech—a mix of Royal Single Crown and Master Crown. There were many speaker cables as each input to the crossover was served by its own AVM amplifier. There were four MA 8.3 monoblock amplifiers (€39,990 per pair) per channel. That’s eight amplifiers in total.
The rest of the all-AVM front end consisted of a CD 8.3 CD player (€9990), an MP 8.3 media player (€13,490), a PA 8.3 preamp (€10,990), and two PC 5.3 power conditioners (€6890 each). These prices are for vesions with matte faceplates. The polished chrome faceplates as displayed ratchet up the price significantly, but I wasn’t able to verify by how much.
The room was always busy, so listening was difficult. I did manage to partially clear the room by getting them to play “Fight” by The Tragically Hip at extremely high levels. The Gemini energized the room very well, with powerful, dynamic bass that was just a touch out of control (this was the first day of the show and the speakers likely needed some tuning and loosening up).
This was supersystem sound. I’ve experienced this type of sound via several demos of large, expensive, multi-driver speakers. Large sound, concussively delivered. At low levels, there was still a realistic sense of dynamics and careful shadings through the midrange. Some of the room sound was evident in the bass. I was thinking that perhaps the sound will improve in the days ahead.
Nevertheless, what a great start to this show.
Jason Thorpe
Senior Editor, SoundStage!
