There’s so much going on at the High End show in Munich that it’s impossible to keep track of everything. So I’m not going to be too hard on myself for missing something important.
I always try to look in on Lithuania-based Reed, because their turntables and tonearms are so damn cool. At Audio Video Show 2025, Reed was sharing a room with Hart Lab, an electronics brand based in Greece, and Aretai, a speaker manufacturer based in Lativa.
We’ve covered Aretai speakers in the past. Two years ago here in Warsaw, we were mightily impressed by their sound, and by the well-reasoned science behind their designs.
This year, Aretai presented a new speaker, the Contra 200F, which retails for €27,800 per pair. This medium-sized floorstander looked very smart—nun-like in its piano-black cabinet with a matte-white tweeter waveguide. The Contra 200F was created for large rooms, but it performed well in this small space. Aretai’s fundamental principle is to ensure consistent, accurate off-axis response. The tweeter’s obvious waveguide, combined with the more moderate one on the midrange, combine to help achieve this goal.
The three-way Contra 200F’s bass is augmented by a rear-facing driver, which creates a cardioid radiation pattern, enabling bass down to 30Hz.
The amplification chain came from Hart Lab, a company new to me. The €30,000 Tune Four Reference Series preamplifier is a tube design, using four CV181 tubes in an extremely well-provisioned circuit. There’s a stepped potentiometer, battery emulator, and full dual-mono signal path, along with lots of other tricks.
I was most impressed by the Tune Three stereo amplifier. Retailing for a not-extreme €30,000, this amplifier employs a tube input stage and a solid-state output stage, with zero feedback. It’s rated at 165Wpc into 8 ohms and 275Wpc into 4 ohms.
As you might have guessed, this room was playing vinyl exclusively, which is just great. It ignites a purity in a room that prevents cancer, I believe. The Reed Muse 3C turntable, which looks like it belongs in a NASA lab, sells for a reasonable €21,400, but then you’ve got to load it up with a tonearm and cartridge. Reed can help here also, offering both the 5T arm and 3P cartridge, which retail for €17,160 and €4719, respectively.
Reed’s sales manager Ruta Triukiene and production manager Jonas Vaiciukynas
The reason for me writing up this excellent-sounding room was some news I’d missed back at High End 2025—Reed has partnered with DS Audio to release its own optical cartridge, the SF (€8850), which uses the optical generator pioneered by the Japanese company. This is big news, because it makes Reed the first manufacturer to license DS Audio’s optical-cartridge technology.
The SF is fitted with a sapphire cantilever and a Micro Ridge stylus. The body is made from a phenolic resin, which Reed chose after experimenting with Panzerholz wood and aluminum.
I have had extensive experience with DS Audio’s optical cartridges, having reviewed both the DS 003 and W3 cartridges. As you may well be aware, optical cartridges require their own phono stages because they operate on a fundamentally different principle from magnetic cartridges.
DS Audio made the technical specifications of its cartridges publicly available, enabling other companies to build their own optical phono stages, but up to now have not partnered up with another company to license the cartridges. I reviewed the EMM Labs DS‑EQ1 optical phono stage a couple of years back and found it excellent, sounding dramatically better than the DS 003 phono stage that DS Audio matches with the cartridge of the same name. As of this writing, there are several other companies making optical phono stages, but the Reed SF is the first cartridge using optical technology produced by a company other than DS Audio. And that’s the big news here.
Reed has also produced their own optical phono stage to mate with the SF. The Reed EQ is a two-chassis unit that retails for €29,500. It’s machined from solid aluminum and features a battery power supply isolated from AC power. All circuits are discrete components, with no ICs. The circuit board is gold-plated, and—this is cool—the EQ features a built-in headphone amplifier.
I spent quite a while in this room as I wrote this up while listening. The sound was excellent, with a good, solid foundation down low and a crisp, expressive midrange. It was clear that there were tubes in the system, as the midrange through the treble was full of overtones. It was wet, but not too much so. Moist, more like.
As I’ve experienced with optical cartridges, there was next to no surface noise, the optical-cartridge architecture resulting in a rejection of physical artifacts. The excellent sense of attack that I’ve come to enjoy with my DS 003 and DS‑EQ1 setup was replicated here, and I think I’m quite confident in saying that this is pretty much as good as it’s possible to get with an analog front end.
Jason Thorpe
Senior Editor, SoundStage!
