But first things first: Just after welcoming us, Alfred Rudolph presented us with some of his recently made recordings of the Talking Horns. The multi-instrumental quartet plays alto, soprano, tenor and baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, alto flute, trombone, bass trombone, tenor horn, tuba and flugelhorn, and those also even in church rooms with their impressive reverberation time. For the recording, two Neumann small membrane microphones were used on a wooden ball, whose amplified signal was recorded with a Telefunken M15. This tape machine was just standing in the Audio Forum. As the recording should be released later on LP, and thus unnecessary playback of the original tapes was taboo, we listened to the tape which was running during the rehearsals, but with the discussion between the musicians in the intervals or pieces of songs, which came over even more authentically. For the playback via the Poseydon loudspeakers, a roughly 600kg heavy construction with twelve ten inch bass drivers, hyper spherical horn, and ion tweeters, with an efficiency from roughly 99 decibels, at a price per pair of more than 200,000 Euros, it really felt like being in a church. The instruments sounded just like in real life at their original loudness and volume, without any limitation at all in dynamics—it was possible to feel the acoustics of the recording room.

This was not the hi-fi stereoscopic effect, an illusion of a room that reaches well beyond the back of the loudspeaker level, which can be created with very good chains. The Acapella chain seemed to bring the listener into a room with musicians. And if these seemed to stand in the large showroom with a realistic size and distance to you, any projection of the quartet in the virtual depth behind the speakers would only be hi-fi gimmicks. The playback of Alfred Rudolph's recording via his loudspeakers is closer to reality than anything I've heard before—even if it's for a rim shot on the snare, one of the meanest impulses, which usually overstrains the dynamic capabilities of even very high quality equipment. But a loudspeaker system which didn't even have the slightest problem in reproducing four partly unleashed playing wind instruments including tuba players wouldn't show any weaknesses even for drums. Whoever can also name the spatial and has the pecuniary requisites for a Poseydon should at least experience it once in the Audio Forum. I don't even want to think about larger models.

A large part of this successful presentation naturally was due to the unsurpassable source, the master tape. But that's not all:  Alfred Rudolph naturally has tuned the recording as well as the playback chain, with—among other things—a type of wooden rocker near the head carrier of the M15. As part of the test recordings were made with, and some without, these items, the effect of the extremely highly detailed chain in the Audio Forum can at least be understood. Having their own recordings of orchestras or jazz combos are another connection for the owners of Acapella. Alongside the audiophile republication of Esther, Cantate Domino, Jazz at the Pawnshop, Antiphone Blues and Sweet Lucy, Hermann Winters also did his own recordings, first in analogue, and then increasingly, for logistical reasons, in digital. For him it was important to limit the number of microphones—at the most two—to exclude phase problems. Surprisingly, he doesn't automatically believe that a master tape is the best sounding medium: "A record can sound better." He even has an answer ready for the objection that the record playback would be accompanied by mechanical artefacts: "If you can hear mechanical artefacts, then Alfred hasn't optimized the record player. A record player can also be an instrument."