The other day I heard the Meistersinger Overture for the first time again - this, or something similar, is how a witty and profound aphorism by Friedrich Nietzsche begins. In it, the thinker strikes cultural-philosophical sparks from his deeply ambivalent attitude toward Wagner's music, torn between fascination and repulsion. I always found the phrase that one could experience significant music »once again for the first time« particularly apt, both rhetorically and factually. Every passionate listener knows this. One's self or the circumstances have become different. Suddenly one hears the supposedly familiar under new auspices. What brought me to the High End were such equally ear-opening and sometimes disturbing experiences: Good sound, I soon learned, was not simply a luxurious ingredient to music that could be enjoyed in lower quality without damage, just less comfortably. In the true sense, it is rather the access to the music itself. How wide the gates open all at once when a new device clears away obstacles that you sometimes didn't even suspect were there in the first place!

This is especially true for loudspeakers. No component causes more ear-pleasing changes. That's why they are not only noticed and appreciated, but literally revered: for many listeners, they are often even more distinctive objects of desire than other components. I can sympathize with this. I, too, now look with pleasure and at the same time with awe at the picture-perfect, one meter twenty high columns of the Liszt Reference, clad in noble cherry real wood veneer, which still stand unplayed in my listening room.

The reputation of Vienna Acoustics loudspeakers precedes them. The name alone must sound enticing to the ears of all aficionados. It's true that Peter Gansterer develops his meticulously sounded transducers in a small town in Lower Austria. But in Vienna, the capital of music, the ardent lover of classical music grew up, there he experienced and studied the famous halls, the Musikverein, the Konzerthaus, the State Opera in detail. How often I have heard melomaniacs and connoisseurs of classical music praise the loudspeakers of Vienna Acoustics. Their musicality, their naturalness and their pleasant timbre, they say again and again, are hard to beat. But I have never been able to experience them myself.