Munich 2025

In Room F231c, located in a pleasantly less crowded area of the MOC at High End Munich 2025, a bunch of AirTight tubed gear was demo’ed in a system with Wolf von Langa 11334 Serendipity+ speakers — small but mighty stand-mounts with side-firing push-push woofers whose sound belied their size. In addition, there were a couple of notable analog debuts, including new tonearms and a turntable from PrimaryControl, a Dutch manufacturer.

The PrimaryControl Kinea II turntable was setup with two of the maker’s newest tonearms: an FCL tonearm — FCL stands for “Field Coil Loaded” — and a Solaris tonearm. The FCL arm had an AirTight Opus-1 cartridge mounted on the end, and the Solaris arm boasted an AirTight PC-1 Supreme cart. The rest of the system consisted of a full AirTight stack featuring an ATH-2 Reference step-up transformer, ATE-5 phono EQ, ATC-6 preamp, ATM-1 power amp (2024 edition), and an ATM-2 Plus power amp. Racks were beaudioful Räck-R models.

PrimaryControl’s Director Bernd Hemmen explained more about his company’s latest designs, which are German-engineered and made in the Netherlands. The Kinea II turntable is based on a direct-drive type but it uses a low-torque, air-coil motor. Hemmen pointed out that the Kinea II table runs smoothly with lower torque, but the user can change the torque settings if desired.

Both the PrimaryControl FCL and Solaris arms are stabilized unipivot designs and share elements of the same bearing construction, but differ in other ways. As mentioned earlier, the FCL is field-coil-loaded, and it’s stabilized with electromagnetic forces — and it comes with its own external power supply unit.

The Solaris arm (seen above), which Hemmen described as a simplified design, is stabilized with a different, more standard type of magnet (but it’s not an electromagnet).

While I was in the room, the PrimaryControl FCL arm with that AirTight Opus-1 cart was tracking the grooves on It’s Better to Travel, a 1987 album on Mercury from Swing Out Sister — a group that hadn’t crossed my mind in ages. Horns sounded punchy, and the attacks were rapid-fire. Percussion had heft and tonality on brass, and vocals seemed natural. The sound was quite clean and dynamic.

Over in Room E111, Klaudio showed their Magnezar turntable, a direct-drive model that also uses magnets in a different stabilizing application, for electromagnetic braking. It has some interesting design elements as well. The Magnezar featured a Klaudio KD-ARM-AP12 tangential tonearm (with auto-lift), a dual-pivot tonearm — that is, a tonearm with two pivot points — that maintains proper tangency in tracking by following a laser line.

Klaudio’s Peter Park demonstrated some of the Magnezar table’s features for me. Pressing a button automatically lifts the tonearm, then it’s manually put back in its “home” position. When the arm is “back home” in its non-playing position, the magnetic clamping forces — on both the top and bottom of the record — release. Speed accuracy is specified to be ±0.001rpm, with a wow-and-flutter spec of less than 0.05%.

The Klaudio Magnezar table, which is also available in a version without clamping, has speed control and built-in stabilization. There’s some visible blue, water-based liquid inside the table’s platter that’s said to stabilize the platter in rotation, by using centrifugal force as the liquid moves towards the outer circumference of the platter when it’s rotating. Groovy!

My likely final installment in this series, Part 10, is coming soon!

Author bio: Julie Mullins, a lifelong music lover and record collector since age 10 who takes after her audiophile father, is also a contributing editor and reviewer on our sister site, Stereophile, for whom she also writes the monthly Re-Tales column. A former fulltime staffer at Cincinnati’s long-running alt-weekly CityBeat, she programs and hosts a weekly radio show on WAIF called On the Pulse.

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For Ken Micallef’s 11½-minute Munich 2025 video diary, which features a wide swath of new turntables, tonearms, and cartridges, go here.

For Part 1 of Julie Mullins’ Munich 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 2 of Julie Mullins’ Munich 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 3 of Julie Mullins’ Munich 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 4 of Julie Mullins’ Munich 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 5 of Julie Mullins’ Munich 2025 show report, go here

For Part 6 of Julie Mullins’ Munich 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 7 of Julie Mullins’ Munich 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 8 of Julie Mullins’ Munich 2025 show report, go here.

For even more High End Munich 2025 coverage, go here on our sister site Stereophile.