Audio Consulting on fire at Munich High-End Show

Poor fellows. A gaggle of valves nesting in wooden boxes with wooden knobs. I believe thats called kindling.

Its the other people who were next to door to them I feel sorry for. Their show and equipment was ruined through no fault of their own.

Anyway they were playing the Doors "light my fire"!

No; I think it was firehouse by KISS

Are you sure what the cause of this fire was? When I contacted show management about it for my show report, the fire department had not yet determined the cause of the fire. The above links give no answers either.

This is merely to insure you're not indicting a particular company for something they may have been innocent of. If you do have definitive information what caused the fire, exactly, I would like to hear it.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the fire started in the amplifier sitting on the floor. Just look at the pictures. Thanks to the fast action of the fire department, nothing in the room caught fire. Most of equipment is intact. The amp on the floor is in cinders. As an aside, I won’t buy an audio component that isn’t UL approved.

Actually, that doesn't quite seem correct. We're talking about battery-powered electronics so it's not an amp that would have caught fire but rather, a battery charger for it. Why could a battery charger have caught fire? As my show report mentioned, line voltages of 300V (instead of the standard 230V) had been measured at the show during show hours. If such over voltages indeed occurred, they could have been higher yet during low-load evenings (and the incident did occur during the night, with none of the components left powered on but the battery chargers were connected and 'working').

Is that really what happened?

I'm not sure anybody is completely certain at this point but it seems to be a reasonable guess and along the lines of what Jean Hiraga was quoted as saying in the StereoTimes show report.