Montreal heat wave as Sonneteer comes to town

Sonneteer will be showing at the Son & Image show in Montreal March 25th to 28th. BA strikes allowing Sonneteer’s Haider Bahrani will be on hand to talk about the Sonneteer Morpheus system which now comprises of the Music Centre and the Server which was previewed at the CES show in Las Vegas in January.

The production model will have its full début at the Canadian show at which Sonneteer will be hosted by their Canadian representatives Liberty Trading and their glorious leader, Nabil Akhrass.

For the second time this month Sonneteer will be on show with Penaudio loudspeakers. Penaudio will be introducing their Series 2 Ambient lineto Canada as well as the New Sara  which, in the words of Sami Penttila, is a ‘baby Serenade’. Oh and we love the Serenade. We have already heard great things about this speaker from Riverside Audio in the Netherlands. More on the Netherlands show soon.

The Sonneteer Morpheus Server is shipping now and is available in a range of colours. The word from the Sonneteer stables is that Ruby Red is slowly becoming a favourite as the orders pile up and also that at least one has been ordered in the colours of a local London football team!  As you can see from the sneak peek photo we got our hands on, the Server logo and markings are hand engraved onto the aluminium before bright colour anodised.

The Sonneteer Classics will also be on show with the Sedley USB  headlining on the second main performance stage at this festival of sound.

We promise you more as the show progresses.

Shows and buses

We wait for shows all year and suddenly they are happening everywhere. Sonneteer have as good as been on a world tour in the last couple of weeks and it looks to be going on through the spring.

The Audio Festa in Nagoya, Japan hosted Sonneteer represented by Allegro and their head man Kyoji Arai. He had the Sonneteer Morpheus Music Centre and Server on show as well as the Sedley phono stage both of which have had recent award success in the land of the rising Sun.

Sonneteer have also recently been exposed or shown off, should we say, at Axpona in Jacksonville Florida. May Audio Marketing of New York state with Nizar Akhrass at its helm have been faithfully preaching the virtues of hi-fi utopia to the masses for more than 30 years now. The Sonneteer gospel has been a strong component of their sermons for many a year now. They too see the Sonneteer Morpheus Music centre and Server as the guiding light on the path to aural paradise for all music lovers.

VintageRock.com erm..Rock with Sonneteer.

"Sonneteer director Haider Bahrani showed us the Morpheus, which we imagined would look nice in our living room." This was the comment Vintage Rock came up with about the Sonneteer Morpheus Server and Music Centre. They were reporting back on the CES show at which they popped into the Sonneteer and Penaudio Suite at the Venetian Hotel. 


They saw a number of systems attempting to gain traction in this new age of high fidelity. The Sonneteer Morpheus system to them was, well let's just let you read what they said: "The Morpheus from Sonneteer was the sleekest and most discreet. It stores three terabytes of tunes, and like the others, will rip your CDs while you “go make a cup of tea.” You can even control it, like most of the other music servers, with your iPhone[or iPod Touch]."  You can see their full report at Vintagerock.com


The one thing they omitted from their report, as they were comparing Ethernet connections, is that the Sonneteer Morpheus is Wi-fi compatible(wireless network) as well as being Ethernet capable(wired network). So if you don't have your house wired up for Ethernet in every room and your home router is wireless(nearly all are these days) you can be up and away in a matter of minutes.

Showing by the Riverside in the Netherlands

Sonneteer, already popular with the Dutch is now in the good hands of Riverside Audio for the Benelux market. A marketing campaign followed by reviews kicked off early in the new year and new dealers are already taking on stock and demonstrating products. The people behind Riverside have been long standing fans of Sonneteer and welcome the chance to take it to a broader audience whilst maintaining and bettering the standards of service Sonneteer customers have come to expect. The Sonneteer guys will be popping over from time to time to lend support, pick up some cheese(Haider is partial to a bit of Guada) and enjoy the great hospitality always extended to them when over there.

We will be bringing you translations and originals of all the reviews as they are made available to us. The grape vines are twittering that The Morpheus Music Centre has been well received by one of their better hi-fi publications. More soon.

To contact River side please go to their website: http://www.riversideaudio.nl/

Haiderway and diSegno Blog on the Server: We take a peek.

The news pages and blogs have all had their say. Even we've had a word or two. Time to see what the boys behind the products have been spilling from their minds. You can access their blogs from the column opposite.
Haiderway on having the Morpheus Server round for Christmas:

“When we got back,[from Christmas in North Yorkshire] Vicky bought me a copy of Tori Amos' Midwinter Graces CD......
...Got home, switched the server on and popped the CD in. Oh, I have to say the server is so quiet, it makes my Buffalo Linkstation sound like a vacuum cleaner!Where was I? Oh yes; as the CD was being consumed by the server, I popped down stairs and switched on my Morpheus music centre and then My iPod Touch which has the Plug Player installed (about £3 from Apps store). All this took about 3 to 4 minutes.

As you can see in the picture, by the music centre was switched on in our living room I was able to start playing the (ripped and stored) CD from the Server.
The Morpheus music centre was  singing through my loudspeakers and I had full control via the iPod Touch. Oh I made cup of tea at the same time  and my other hand was holding it!  yes, I hear some of you shouting, I should have left it brew for longer to get that fuller flavour." More Haiderway

A little bit technical, as Remo often likes to be [from diSegno]:

"Now you hear it! has been our slogan for the longest time but not this time for this bad boy! This unit has to be ultra quiet itself and also vibration free so it would not cause noise to its surroundings. So the first thing was to get rid of the need of fans in the unit. All the main components, power supply unit etc. must also be fanless versions so they can operate indefinitely without needing a fan to cool it... sounds simple until you realise that they are like hen's teeth to find! Only the latest generations of components are thinking along that way to save power and be silent!

Vibration elimination was a bit more complicated! We have 2 fast hard disk drives inside which whirls, crackles, clicks and vibrates like hell, so the way they are mounted has to be carefully looked into. Having been into cars and our office situated not far from a Lexus dealer, I have looked into ways cars have used to reduce vibration, centrifugal or torque issues when mounting their engines! After some experimentation, the hard drives inside the Morpheus are now mounted on 8 rubber damper mountings, selected by sampling several shores and numbers used before deciding on the best combination. The drives themselves are coupled in a way that their individual vibrations cancels each other, inspired by silent shafts used in car engines, and the final result was rather spectacular!" Oh he does get excited talking about cars. Oh please don't start him off sir!  More diSegno...

Look who's talking about Sonneteer at CES 2010

We've reported back ourselves and our guy's blogs will soon be buzzing with more (once over the jet lag) so here is a moment to see what some of the rest are saying about Sonneteer:

The Stereophile have long been great supporters and always good for a conversation or two have published a fulland detailed CES show report as usual and the bit that interests us can be found here:

http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2010/sonneteer_morpheus_music_server/

Oh and more from them  in multi colour:
http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2010/sonneteer_color_palette/

Alan Sircom's Best of CES report:

The editor of Hi-Fi Plus, a member of the Absolute Sound's stable of publications, pasts his thoughts online with regards his CES experience. It was good to see him in very good spirits with lots of optimism for the audio industry.

http://www.avguide.com/blog/alan-sircom-s-best-ces?page=1

ecoustics.com  have clearly been reading our news pages. Happy to have you on board ladies and gents:
http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/610921.html

Elite Choice, but of course:
http://elitechoice.org/2010/01/05/ces-2010-sonneteer-to-unveil-morpheus-music-centre/

Audio Video Revolution:
These guys popped into the show room and we had a good natter. We, at S-news and Sonneteer, think their vision of where the home entertainment electronics industry is going is akin with ours and will be following their bulletins avidly. Recommended reading, shall we say.
http://www.avrev.com/home-theater-news/music-servers-mp3-players-news/sonneteer-breaks-barriers-with-new-music-server.html

And Phile web from Japan: Fans of ours for a while.
http://www.phileweb.com/news/audio/201001/10/9658.html  in Japanese
or
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://www.phileweb.com/news/audio/201001/10/9658.html&ei=tWZPS6npHo6I0wSGpKGwCg&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDYQ7gEwAA&prev=/search%3Fq%3DSonneteer%2B%2Bces%2Bphileweb%2BCES%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1C1GGLS_en-GB___GB316%26sa%3DG%26tbo%3D1 google translated into English.


I4U. This one has been linked to from all over the web:
http://www.i4u.com/article29620.html

And for lots of show pictures:
http://live.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/ces.pl?&VT_29-310&RoomView&FM&&&&&&CES10

We are also twittering:
http://twitter.com/Sonneteerhifi

CES - Show report: As CES 2010 comes to an end we report back

CES: Las Vegas - The morning of the 11th of January, Las Vegas hosted late breakfast and check out times for 10s of thousands of Engineers, sales reps and marketing folk as the 2010 CES show flies off in to the distant sun.

CES this year was dominated by news of 3DTV and ebook readers whilst nearly every journalist jumped on to these band wagons the rest of the show's exhibits were lost or should I say hidden by the fog of it all. The best of the show is generally away from the 'flash in the pan' media frenzy and often a better guide to what will change our lives over the next few years.

What caught my eye, were things like the Adidas miCoach, a device to aide runners and joggers to measure their performance, and the prevelance of internet connected devices. Internet radio going in to cars, as announced by Ford, could be the sounding of the last bell for DAB for instance.

Of course the high end audio area, at the Venetian Towers is of Particular interest to us and, as we have already reported, Sonneteer, the British luxury music systems maker, were true to form in bringing new ideas to the show with their ultra quiet Morpheus Server, to match their Morpheus Music Centre. Also showing off that their products will be available in a wide range of colours to special order. The server was shown both in black and a sumptuous Burgundy, red.

Needless to say, Sonneteer, though at the luxury end of the home entertainment electronics market have been internet connected for quite sometime now.

Penaudio, the high end luxury loudspeaker manufacturer from Finland were accompanying Sonneteer this year with the launch of their Ambient range of speakers in its Series 2 form. As one enters the show suite, one finds it laid out as a typical home with a dining room area in the upper level and a living room area below over looking the Las Vegas Strip. Two systems were on display both being served by a Sonneteer Morpheus server and a music Centre driving a pair of Serenades from The Penaudio Classic range in the living area and a pair of  Red Chronos from the Ambient in the dining area. The Penaudio Ambient range, as mentioned, has been tweaked up market by using better drive units and a dusting of Sami Pentilla (their chief designer and founder) magic. These will be available in three standard colour, but much like the Sonneteer range, the customer can request other colours which will be available at a premium to the standard price.

Not neglecting their analogue roots, Sonneteer were also demonstrating the Sedley Phono stage which was on show in one of their USA distributor, May Audio's eight show rooms at CES where is was singing merrily to the tune of a Roksan Turntable and a London Decca Cartridge and using Gut Wire cables. The Sedley, now globally renowned for its musical abilities and unmatched flexibility is also available with a USB connection. We have linked to a couple of recent reviews in our pages in the past from UHF and Audio Audition.

Back home and catching up on sleep, we look forward to 2010 with optimism. Roll on CES 2011.