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B.M.C. Audio from Germany showed this triple stack of belt-drive transport, DAC and integrated amplifier. The company initials stand for Bernd Hugo, Manfred Penning and Carlos Candeias whose teams "formerly designed and produced very high-grade audio components for renowned brands (also OEM)" and now join forces in B.M.C.
It weren't the quad-concentric La Sphère cyclopsi by French speaker house Cabasse that attracted my attention in this system but the stack of electronics beneath the Audio Aero source. In years past, this often was an armada of Bel Canto amplification. This year it was all Cabasse.
Sonus Faber and Chario get most the attention when it comes to wooden Italian speakers but Diapason and the new Astera from Alessandro Schiavi and Roberto Pasetti aren't steak & kidney pie in this context. Rather, the recipe is solid Canaletto Walnut in a multi-faceted diamond shape, a 180mm direct-coupled Nextel-treated mid/woofer and 29mm silk dome tweeter with a Hexadym motor, 1.600Hz crossover frequency and 88dB sensitivity.
I'm not usually a complete klutz when it comes to photography but somehow I didn't grapple very successfully with the mostly very underlit rooms while refraining from flash as is my custom. Photoshop can only do so much lightening before heavy pixilation sets in. The German Physiks room was one of many challengers I was bested by. The same could be said for conventional drivers who are judged against the Germans' DDD bending-wave wideband driver.
Combining design cues of a forte piano with that of a violin bow, the Horo turntable with its 30-inch tone arm is yet another reminder—as though even a casual walk through Milano Centrale required one—that the Italians have a special gene for design.
Infinity these days isn't usually a name that springs to mind in a high-end audio context, with Genesis having taken up that slack as it were. But this speaker with the uncommonly ribbed drive units showed that the engineers at Infinity remain not only paid but busy.
