Finally the Hi-Fi & Surround Show was on again after two years and now in new premises - the Marriott Hotel. The Marriott Hotel in Copenhagen offers much better acoustics and more spacious rooms - even the hall ways are more spacious. The hotel is located at the water front in Copenhagen Harbour and the view from most of the rooms is spectacular. The number of exhibitors was relatively low this time compared to earlier years and one of the reason is probably the international crisis. Well – crisis or not you have show your products or you will most likely not sell anything at all.

I have thought about exhibiting at the HiFi & Surround Show several times and asked myself: Is this exhibition the right forum for showing mostly DIY audio products? The show is concentrated on “conventional” Hi-Fi products like amplifiers, loudspeakers, CD-players, turntables and a vast number of “golden opportunity” cables + gimmicks.
I know this is a provocation

A bit late I decided – Now it has to be Ground Sound in Copenhagen! I was offered a spacious stand in the hall way at a fair price – so what could be the theme of the Ground Sound stand? Not really Do-It-Yourself products – so it had to be the DCN28 accompanied by some power amplifier blocks in an active setup to come a little closer to the “conventional” products of the show. Well - which active factory-made loudspeakers? Oh – not really any available. How about a classic well-known vintage like the Dali 40? I have always had an eye on this hard driven well sounding loudspeaker with an excellent bass reproduction – although I have never heard or seen the Dali 40, but all the reports of its characteristics are making it interesting for an active setup. For about a month a set of Dali 40 had been available in the local second hand website. Now it had to be this loudspeaker for the event – a really interesting project… just to find out that the second hand Dali 40 set had been sold just a few hours earlier.

Now what? In stead I got hold of a set of Montana SPX with 2 x 8” bass drivers – not as spectacular and well-known as the Dali 40, but an interesting project anyway.
The process of making the Montana SPX active is described here: Project Montana SPX ...and in Danish at the Danish forum: Nerds.dk Montana SPX passiv til aktiv

The presented audio system was definitely an alternative to the established conventional system of the exhibition – not as extremely expensive as the big Dynaudio setup and not as simple as the rest of the systems. The system was the same as initially used for the activation of the Montana SPX. DCN28 did all of the processing and controlling the volume and a H-Amp dual for bass and a H-Amp quad for mid and tweeter.

The total power of the 6 channels is in excess of 2kW.

On display were also the dual channel power amplifier “Mushroom” (2x300W) and the 50kg 4 channels active amplifier Chassis II1500 (on the floor).

To get attention and to make a little provocation the “scrap” 5+5kg passive crossover was also on display – some found such a big filter very interesting and some went quickly by without stopping as they probably thought “not good enough for me” – I think the same but they didn’t get the point...

The visitors of the show in general aren’t my target group and therefore I didn't have the biggest expectation of being extremely busy talking to potential customers before the show opened. BUT that showed not to be the case – I was actually busy talking and demonstrating the system until 6PM – an hour after closing time Saturday