The best bar evenings of my life, I have experienced in Poland. This was not (exclusively) due to the amount of alcohol consumed, but rather to the hospitality of everyone present at the bar. This trip to Warsaw is not intended to read as a chronicle of bar nights, but very much as a hallmark of fantastic hospitality and surprises.

Since the last visit to Marcin Hamerla's company HEM in Warsaw a few years ago, a lot has changed. The number of employees has almost doubled and HEM has moved to a new location. Previously operating more as a manufacturer in the background, HEM has meanwhile established Ferrum as a hi-fi brand on its own. Sharing paths with Michal Jurewicz and Mytek, however, is meanwhile a thing of the past. HEM no longer produces and develops for Mytek. Still, some Mytek products remained in stock and are being sold by HEM. Customers owning old Mytek components are of course not left out in the cold and will get support by HEM if needed. Marcin comports himself quite openly regarding this issue and it’s important to him not to sweep this separation from Mytek under the carpet. Michal's and Marcin's plans and ideas simply weren’t sufficiently congruent anymore and led therefore to disagreements, so consequently a split was inevitable. Fortunately, not only Mytek, now exclusively under Michal's leadership, still remains with us, but Marcin's, respectively HEM's company Ferrum was also given the chance to see the light of the audio world. From this point of view, the separation of HEM from Mytek, or vice versa - depending on your individual perspective, was probably not the worst thing that could have happened to the outside world. What Marcin's engineers are really capable of, they could already impressively prove with the hybrid power supply HYPSOS and the headphone amplifier OOR. Correspondingly, I am very much looking forward to a site visit to meet the people who are bringing Ferrum to life.

Initially, the travel planning turns out to be not that easy, as I have to break away from my main job at the theater on one hand, while Dirk Sommer, my editor-in-chief, wants to enrich our visit to Warsaw with a few more appointments on the other. The handover of the STATEMENT-in-High-Fidelity-Award in conjunction with our Polish colleague Wojtek Pacula, as well as a visit to the Krakow Sonic Society are planned. After some twists and turns everything snaps in and we meet in Leipzig for the joint onward journey to Warsaw. The trip runs smoothly without any incidents, except for the unrestrainedly crowded access road to the hotel in the evening. After checking in, Dirk, his spouse Birgit and I set off on a short walkabout, along the Palace of Culture, into downtown Warsaw to find a restaurant for dinner. Back at the hotel, I am attracted by the spectacular illumination of the Palace of Culture and head out again with my photo equipment into the pleasantly cool night. Shortly before the lighting of the palace is switched off at midnight and a light drizzle starts to fall, I still manage to get some photos taken.