We spent most of the day wandering: about 1/4 on the main floor exhibits, 1/4 on the first floor exhibits and about 1/2 at T.H.E. Show (which has a high-end audio focus).

Pioneer Alter… I mean exhibit

Quick take-away: Audio sucks at CEDIA and Video sucks at T.H.E. Show.

Today was much busier than yesterday. We may just skip atending tomorrows show because the expected crowds will make it even harder to see and/or hear anything. Sunday should be nice and quiet and we should get in to a few final demos.

Yesterday, we did get the JL Audio Demo (Subwoofer was impressive, the other speakers not) and the Meridian / Faroudja Demo (video was very impressive, audio was low mid-fi). More details on these later.

Every system at the T.H.E. Show had better sound than any system we heard at the main CEDIA show (there are still systems we have not heard there, so this is not, and cannot, be an absolute statement). The audio systems at CEDIA seem aimed to do one thing - pressurize the room.

Watching the faces of the show goers during demos and during an exhibition-hall wide commercial announcement that was SO loud and SO distorted - I’d say that HT installers think this is just the way audio systems sound. My heart goes out to all the people paying big bucks for systems that are really almost unlistenable.

The typical sound has a midrange that breaks up into clacky noises without harmonic content, sounds with unpredicatble and very sharp transients,

The typical bass is thumpy and loose and overwhelming without emotional content or even shock value.

The typical soundstage, there ain’t none (!), [directionality is all gimic and wows and effects and not continuous thoughout the movie - it is just kind of added in as a condiment - it was a pleasant shock to hear a video that had a soundstage when we got to T.H.E. Show after a day and a half at CEDIA].

I’d say 80% of the video at CEDIA was first rate - significantly better than anything I’ve seen outside of computer generated animations runing on computer monitors. The video at T.H.E. Show was for the most part pixelated, washed out, distorted, low resolution, etc.

Anyway, we’ll do a critique of each room’s sound - in general, the sounds at T.H.E. Show did not embarass themselves - and one room was quite impressive, and all but two were running videos.

Picks and pics of T.H.E. Show later…

Pics of CEDIA are here:

Nordost Heimdall cable connected to an IPOD

Acoustic Zen subwoofer in a furniture-quality wood finish

The 2006 CEDIA EXPO Show Report Day 2

I think my comments are meandering all over the place…. I think I need to go back to touching up photos befoer everyone thinks I am pixelated and washed out with a collapsing midrange and… Uh. Oh.

Sony has guts. Magnifying glass setup in front of sony monitor (forget which one, sorry).

Earthquake subwoofer driver. No ma, I absolutely will NOT try to pick it up. But why not put how much it weighs on the sign so we don’t have to guess that it weighs.. a lot.

InFocus ScreenPlay 777 projector. Some of these puppies are BIG. Tried to photo the Meridian / Faruja DILA monster (whose performance seemed freakin’ awesome to these eyeballs) but it didn’t come out very well. Try again later.

CEDIA EXPO 2006 Denver Colorado Day One Part Three

Enjoy!

Been a long day.

Covered the entire main floor. Did not get to the smaller first floor nor across the street to T.H.E. Show.

First impressions:

There are LOTS of audio companies here at the show. At least half of the exhibits, if not more.

Cabasse loudspeaker cut-away…click to see large picture.

The sound here sucks. Sucks. Really. Bad.

The video is great! Wow. Nothing like what I see at Circuit City or Ultimate Electronics. (Well, except the Sony SXRD 60″ at Ultimate E. of course).

Fujitsu’s Aviamo were very, very excellent as were several others including Sony’s XBR2 1080p 56(?)” …. click to see large picture.

OK, Sleep now. More later.

Oh, CAL (California Audio Labs) is back. And they make large red speakers now as well as electronics…?

There are 100 or so (large) pics up at:

CEDIA EXPO 2006 Denver Day One Part One

CEDIA EXPO 2006 Denver Day One Part Two

Hopefully more tomorrow morning… before we drive down to the show again (it is about an hour drive from here).

… as well as the Acoustic Zen line of cables (which we have been recommending for years - even though they are not quite in the stratospheric, some might say astronomical , price range as the cables we generally prefer here).

But the Adagios are not just a good value, they are an exceptional value. We believe them to be a high-end loudspeaker at a lower mid-fi price of $4300

We have a number of customers (and fans) who get a little short of breath (or their significant others do ) when they think about purchasing $50K speakers.

We will also be getting in, hopefully in the near future, the $12K or so Marten Design Miles III and Kharma 3.1c loudspeakers - which are also near-full-range like the Adagios.

And of course there are the Audio Note U.K. loudspeakers at these price ranges for those who just want a speaker to sound good

All of these speakers we have heard either many times or for many hours - and they have our full respect and we have recommended them many times.

Although we specialize in the ultimate cost-no-object high-end audio system, we really do try to help people with systems in all price ranges.

I guess what all this means is that people who actually make it to the store here will soon get a chance to hear that there are a few bargains out there (a very few) and that in the end you get what you pay for - but there can be happiness, satisfaction and pride-of-ownership at every price range.

You just need to stay away from the crap and the glitter and the over-hyped junk.

Just to give y’all out there some perspective, we will soon have loudspeakers here at AF that are $250K, $145K (on sale, somebody buy these now please , $55K, $50K, $40K, $33K and now…. $4K.

OK, a picture of the Adagio speakers similar to the ones we will be getting in a few days.

The CEDIA EXPO Daily Newspaper

Kind of nice for them to snail mail everyone who registers this daily. ‘Course, we did pay $50 to register…

It has a nice map of the convention inside… Maybe I should photo that….

Anyway, news in the paper mentioned that Rives (the roo-treatment company) bought Talon (the loudspeaker company)…

O….. K……

When we get back we’ll post some photos here and in the CEDIA EXPO 2006 Denver Show Report Dailies.

Our Soundlabs are temporarily gutless - we sent their innards back to the factory for a couple of upgrades:

The Soundlab Ultimate loudspeakers, with Kharma’s Mini Exquisites in front and a EDGE Signature One monoblock amp behind

The Soundlab Ultimate loudspeakers, where the transformer goes when it is here.

The U1’s should be a good deal more efficient when they get reassembled - and their sound will be as good (or better!) as it was before.

Can’t wait!

A complete report will be forthcoming when we get everything going again and broken in…

Does anyone really remember what CEDIA stands for without looking it up?

I mean:

“Consumer Electronics Design and Installation Association”?

For some reason I think a lot more installation is going on than design. But there does seem to be a lot of consuming, and so high-end audio does look at CEDIA with both Fear And Longing.

But if they called it:

“INstalling HOme Theater for fun and PROfit” or INHOTPRO

it would be a lot easier to remember.

Or not.

Its mostly a mental thing - and hardly anything to do with audio. I mean, if someone is crazy about audio = spends gazillion dollars and quintillion brain cycles on the stuff, they naturally have to be careful about the consideration of other possible hobbies.

Just because we are craxy does not mean we aren’t perfectly aware of how crazy obsessed passionate we are and cautious about getting any crazier by getting into the visual side of the entertainment event reproduction chain.

So, video is great and we are on the upgrade path, slow as it may seem to other real videoholics (we just got a Sony 26″ XBR LCD TV) - we are just NOT going to go nuts over the stuff.

There is only so much craziness to go around - craziness don’t grow on trees, ya know. [It has to be carefully cultivated and nurtured for years…:-]

Anyway, the mode here is to twiddle bits between autitions and get the show report infrastructure up and clicking:

CES 2006 DENVER

[Yes, we KNOW the Hifiing logo is too big. I’m just tired with mucking with it]

Not sure if we are just going to do the dailies (aka episodes - cute huh?) with buckets of pix, or a real report. I guess there has to be a ‘Did it Suck or Not’ kind of summary so who knows…

Only the Shadow Knows For Sure… or

Only the Echo Knows For Sure.

The full pictorial of the HRS MXR equipment rack setup is at:

HRS MXR equipment rack setup

But it will be a little while until we add these latest pictures, we though some people might want to see this now.

The HRS MXR equipment rack without the top shelf

The special HRS MXR equipment rack turntable-platform-support rails.

Neli holding one of the special HRS MXR equipment rack turntable-platform-support rails. These ’steel girder-like constructions’ weigh about 30lbs each.

The HRS MXR with one turntable-support rail installed. The rails just sit right on the two cups, one on each side of the rack. They slide down on them with a snugness which bespeaks engineering tolerances almost unheard of in our industry.

The HRS MXR with both turntable-support rails installed

View of the entire HRS MXR rack. Looking a little empty with just the Audio Aero Perstige CD / SACD player which is also serving as pre-amp in this system configuration.

The HRS MXR equipment rack with Brinkmann’s Balance turntable on its special HRS Isolation Base on the support rails we just installed.

Close up of how the feet of the special HRS platform for the Brinkmann sit in the troth which was formed by the top of the steel rails

I saw both HD-DVD and BLU-RAY demos at the local audio (Mirage, KEF) / video mart.

Besides coming away with a vow to never underestimate the capability of some stores to treat people like they were marks at a carnival,…

I was not able to determine much visual difference between the new HighRes video formats and their ordinary DVD bretheren.

There was not more clarity or detail or color variety or…., except in perhaps a few rare scenes, (say one out of every 10 seconds the image would tighten-up and there would be increased definition).

This is partially because DVD upsampling… I mean upscaling technologies are getting better and better all the time - and partly because the monitors are not all 1080p yet.

We’ll see more at CEDIA 2006 in Denver, but all this seems mightily familiar, doesn’t it? How SACD / DVD-AUDIO are better, but not worlds better, than the format they were trying to supplant.

If, for the money, an ordinary Mary or Joe can spend a modest amount more on the player / video screen to get more improvement than what a similar investment in the new, ‘risky’ format offers… well…..

The one thing that the new video formats have going is CAPACITY. At 10 times the capacity of an ordinary DVD, things like T.V. series anthologies will fit on fewer than, well, let’s see: the 78 episodes of Star Trek would fit on only 2 discs, and on only 1 disc when the next generation[sic] DVD discs under-development come out.

Anyway, I originally hoped that these new HD discs might be used for highres audio - but now I wonder about the future of the format itself.

Perhaps it will be up to the HTPC and ipodPC crowd to take the format where no recording conglomerate will be able to go: because there will always be the inevitable HD-DVD-burners on computers…..