Year in and year out, I attend shows in venues I’m intimately familiar with. For better and worse (mostly the latter), I’ve come to know the acoustic challenges of the big rooms and the small ones in Chicago, in Munich, in Denver, in Las Vegas (back when there were shows in Denver and Las Vegas). But it’s been quite a while since I’ve attended a show in an entirely new and unfamiliar spot.
This time around, that is exactly what I did, as the High End Society pulled up its Munich stakes and moved to Vienna’s ACV (Austria’s convention center in Vienna).
Like the rest of the press, I didn’t know what to expect sonically, but, as it turned out, the move was mostly for the better. Where everything (save for a handful of astonishing outliers) tended to sound simultaneously dark and bright in Munich’s so-called “rooms” (really just partitioned-off spaces with glass rear and front walls), the rooms in Vienna were, for the most part, more solid and more neutrally balanced, making for better performance and better listening (thus, the larger number of candidates for Best of Show).