Ascendo and Behold
All prices in euros (€) unless otherwise noted.
At time of report, 1 € is approximately 1.37 US dollars.

It’s certainly no surprise that Germany’s Ascendo and Behold once again produced some of the best sound heard at High End -- we've given them this same award in years past. Perhaps they have a home-turf advantage.

This year we were introduced to a new speaker system from Ascendo, the System F (12,000 € per pair), which is featured as a ShowStopper, and it was a treat. The soundstage that the System F cast was the real story here: deep, wide, and with almost walk-through realism, it was the kind of reproduced sound that suspends disbelief for those precious few moments, and that’s the experience that makes it special.

The System F was aided by some of the most ambitious electronics in the industry: Behold was using the Gentle integrated amplifier (18,000 €) with its new hard-disk player as the source feeding an APU768 digital-processing unit (25,000 €), which in turn drove a pair of BPA-768 amplifiers (26,675 € each) in a vertically biamped configuration. Wiring and racks were by Germany’s High End Masterclass.