What’s New

What's New

HIGH END Munich Preview

By Jim Garrett
Senior Director, Product Strategy and Planning
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The month of May is right around the corner which means that HIGH END Munich – the world’s largest dedicated hi-fi show – is once again upon us. This year is the last year for the show to be held in Munich, Germany before it moves to Vienna, Austria for the 2026 edition. To say auf weidersehen to Munich in proper fashion, we have secured one of the largest exhibit spaces at the show where we will be announcing nine new products from three of our prestigious brands. We are incredibly excited for you to see and hear them in Atrium 4.1, Room E119 during the show which runs from 15-18 of May.

JBL loudspeakers are legendary, and we pack them full of patented and proprietary acoustic technology. This year, we’ll be unveiling three new loudspeakers that allow you to experience music at its highest level. As the first phase of a new reference series, these models represent the peak of loudspeaker design and performance and will set the stage for what’s to come as we approach JBL’s 80th anniversary in 2026. While this series has been in development for years, these first three are ready for their world debut at Munich. We’ve been listening to them in our Northridge, California engineering center and I cannot express how incredible they sound and how excited we are to play them for you in just a few weeks. For those of you able to make the ascent towards the pinnacle of sound with us at Munich, you are in for something special as loudspeakers like these don’t come along very often.

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A great loudspeaker needs a formidable electronics front end to form the bedrock of your system and to allow your music to erupt with the energy and emotion you desire. For more than fifty years, Mark Levinson audio systems have set the benchmark for high-fidelity audio reproduction with some of the finest amplifiers and preamplifiers ever built. The next generation has been bubbling below the surface and soon we’ll be sharing the first three elements as the tectonic plates shift for their reveal. Power, Purity, and Precision – hallmarks of our designs – flow forth from a luxurious chassis machined and extruded from aluminum and illuminated with our signature red lighting. As with the JBL loudspeakers highlighted above, we’ve been crafting these new models for quite some time and have been doing listening sessions with our Mark Levinson engineering team in the Northridge, California labs. We’ve worked with our global dealer and distributor partners around the world to create this next generation and we can’t wait to showcase them to you in our demonstration rooms at Munich.
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Having just returned from the AXPONA audio show in Chicago, Illinois this past weekend, I can tell you the excitement around the ARCAM Radia Series is growing. We demonstrated the new flagship SA45 streaming integrated amplifier along with its smaller sibling the SA35 and the ST25 streamer and attendees were blown away by the combination of features, sound quality, and that signature Radia industrial design with its yellow accents. These three models make up the second phase of the Radia hi-fi range and bring the total number of models now to eight. While our team was developing them, we spilled some of the engineering refinements onto the three amplifiers from the first phase – the A5, A15, and A25. You could say they are the same amplifiers, plus a little something extra.  Sure, this update is coming only two years after their introduction, but we know you’ll appreciate the improvements and additions we’ve made.

We are excited to finally be able reveal these products to the world. Final preparation for the show is in high gear and it promises to be something you won’t want to miss. If you are planning on attending, I look forward to meeting with you and getting your thoughts and impressions on what we have created. We’ll see you soon in Munich!