We linked to Audioholics this year off of our main CES 2007 show page.

Boy, those guys have a bad attitude. If you read their suggestions for CES - geez. No wonder the Press are in disfavor and rapidly approaching lawyers in likeablility.
Anyway, getting to their Best of Show:

They like Snell and RBH. OK. Fine. They cover the low end of the Impressive speaker market.

They liked the Hansen Emperor speaker room too. Good for them, so did we. Hansen has a professional demeaner, I am good with that - but these guys think they are getting dissed because they only cover the low-end.

Then they described the MBL room as “screechy and fatiguing” and complained about Grace Jones not being ‘music’ enough for them.

Well, in previous show reports we’ve already talked about people, especially press, who only want to hear their kind of music and treat everyone else’s like it is personally offensive.

But as for the MBL’s - I just don’t think MBL *CAN* be ’screechy’ [it can be fatiguing, but not because it is screechy]. I don’t think there is an amp BIG enough to make them screechy.

So what in heck are they referring to that they call ’screechy’?

Was it too loud and they were hearing room anomalies? Perhaps they both listen to music in treated rooms - after all, Home Theater SPLs are right up there with Rock Concert SPLs [at least that is the level I like to play ours at, whenever it is possible ], and mid-fi speakers need all the help they can get at those levels.

And there was no way the MBLs themselves, nor their amps, were overdriven in a room as small as theirs at CES without doing real damage to the walls and ceiling, not to mention ear drums.

MBLs aren’t our favorite speakers, in fact it is their inability to be screechy that we think they are somewhat flawed, lacking the resolutoin and ability to form notes quickly enough.

So, anyway, it was probably just a way to impres their readership by making fun of the high-end. This was the first time I have scoped out their show reportage and I expected … something different I guess.

So, yes I am finally really truly back from CES and the blog gets to go back to Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences.

OK, this installment has about 300 photos from the Venetian high-end, I mean high performance, audio exhibits located in the meeting rooms on floors 2, 3 and 4.

The report is always at, and will always be at:

High Performance Audio at CES 2007

The next and last installment will be focused on mostly video at CES, located in the Central Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC).

Have fun!

-Mike.

This installment contains about 400 photos and commentary of THE SHOW at the St. Tropez in Las Vegas running simultaneously with CES.

The report is still here:

High-end Audio at THE SHOW at CES, 2007

Enjoy!

Next is the second, third and forth floors at the Venetian, which will conclude the high-end audio portion of our show.

The final installment will be coverage of the Central Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The second installment of the CES report includes almost 400 photos from the 3 wings of floor 29 in the Venetian Tower.

This release includes the photos in the 1500 x 1000 pixel (high resolution) and 1000 x 800 pixel (medium resolution) formats.

I think [hope] that, at about 800 photos, we are more than half-way done with this report.

Enjoy!

Oh, it is here:

CES 2007 Show Photos and Editorials

The first ‘installment’ is up - which includes about 200 photos of high-end audio and 200 of the main conference (mostly home theater , home theater audio, audio, ipod paraphenelia, etc).

At this rate the report will be done by… uh, this was just the first day’s report.

Let’s just say it will get done.

CES 2007 Conference Photos and Commentary

Oh! And for those who prefer smaller, 1000 pixel max width, 800 pixel max height photos - that will be forthcoming…

Enjoy!

We just got back from CES. Took awhile…

Got back Monday night and got to shovel a shovel’s width path through the some 2 foot drifts of this kind of snow-ice mixture that was lots of fun so that we could get up the steps.

Last Friday, whem we were supposed to drive home, our usual travel route was snow packed, with snowing and blowing snow with anticipated very slow going with a topping of lots of white knuckles.

So we took the southern route througb Flagstaff.

Well, that didn’t work out either - we ran right away into blowing snow at 3000 ft, …. and Flagstaff is at 7500 or so.

So we took the REALLY Southern route, through Phoenix, Tucson, up through Albuquerque and Santa Fe. It was cold down there too (40’s during the day) but at least it wasn’t snowing.

We timed it just right, the way being relatively dry all the way home.

Unfortunately, we had to be back by tomorrow, Tuesday, to receive the few things we shipped from CES. Otherwise, we might have been tempted to spend the Winter in the sunshine… and say the heck with this white fluffy stuff. Hrrrumph.

At times it felt like “Argh! Another storm cloud! Farther South, James! South!”

During all this traveling I did get qutie a bit of time to work in the show report - mostly at night- but just the descriptions though, as the laptop is a little slow at image processing on the scale of a full-blown show report.

Today it was time to complete the photography of THE SHOW at the St. Tropez.

Although there were quite a few rooms at the THE SHOW show, it was still only about 50 - 60% of the CES show in the Venetian. It would be even less, but many exhibitors had two room suites, which I count as two rooms, whereas all rooms at the Venetian were single rooms.

A few conclusions:

* There was less traffic at THE SHOW than last year when it was next door to CES at the Alexis Park. More of the exhibitors at THE SHOW might consider showing next year at the Venetian if there were not a steady stream of horror stories coming out of the Venetian.

* There was more traffic for exhibitors who were near other exhibitors. There is a big advantage to the dense clustering of rooms - for exhbitors who want traffic and attendees who want their feet to be less flat [show organizers are you listening?].

* The sound at the THE SHOW at the St. Tropez was about the same as last year: Cogent wasn’t there, unfortunately, but this year there was us in the Audio Note room , Kondo sounded better than last year, and Kharma transitioned from CES to the show as well. That said, given if one had the same exact systems at THE SHOW and RMAF - I think they would sound better at RMAF. *Why* that appears to be, I do not know.

* The sound at CES was… well, it has always been mixed, as well, with a few nuggets amongst the average and ‘trying hards’. I guess it was about the same, given the steady increase in quality we see year after year at most shows. For me, the rooms I thought were the most tempting were the Lamm, Hanson, and Audiomachina. Neli’s faves were the EAR room (featuring the new Marten ‘Bird’ speaker) and the Lamm room.

* There were a number of rooms I did not get to hear - Rockport for example, Rives is another, who were not playing music when I was there - and my visits were fleeting in rooms where it did not appear to be a reason to stay longer.

* Lamm did play their one working ML3 on one of the Wilsons and Neli got to hear it for quite some time. Hopefully I will be able to *extract* the juicy details But, to summarize, she liked it - it appears to be SIGNIFICANTLY better than the ML2.1 in ALL audiophile attributes, especially control of the speaker, dynamics, and transparency.

* The Venetian really, really doesn’t want exhibitors in their hotel rooms [in the tower] - presumably thinking that they all should be in the regular exhibit rooms [levels 2, 3 and 4] - and they make this obvious by seemingly treating the exhibitors very poorly. The regular exhibit rooms are decent sized rooms but with movable walls - that are hard to the touch but hollow and so not as substantial as the rooms in the tower. Given the opportunity variety of systems in those rooms - I did NOT hear any significant universal problems with the sound in these fabricated rooms.

I am not sure why there are any exhibitors in the tower except that someone must have thought that the systems would sound better up there. They might - but it would be a more level playing field if everybody was in one place or another. The Munich show each Spring is in an environment similar to the regular exhibit rooms - and they seem to manage it. Anyway, my point is that perhaps everybody should show just on the lower levels.

* Next year we, Audio Federation, will likely have our own room, with most probably a 100% Audio Note system fronted by different speakers [what is that, a 99% Audio Note system? ]. It will be an upscale system - with kind of system and setup and optimizations that people have come to expect from us who have attended RMAF or visited our website - a demonstration of the kind of sound we have been getting by pairing Audio Note with other brands of equipment [Audio Note equipment really does work well with others]. This year the rooms sounded darn good - but it was a collaborative effort and none of the collaborators really got to optimize the system the way they really wanted it - we certainly didn’t.

* About 2500 photos were taken. About the same as HE 2006 [which was about 2700 - I mistakenly used Windows to count the photos and counted the RAW images as well as the ordinary images] but about 1/2 the number of closeup photos. Getting a shot of every component was just looking to be too much work for 4 days - and so I tried to just photograph components that we have not photographed before or were somehow different from previous years. Each system of every room that I was able to find I photographed - although some have people standing in front of the system acting as kind of semi-intelligent, interactive, wandering room treatment components.

* The show report…. *sigh* … will be forthcoming. Really. But first we have to find a way to get home, and right now we are tempted to just wait for Spring.

CES 2007 - Day FOUR dailies

Day three was busy. Finished photos of the Venetian and of the Central Conference Hall at the main conference. Also checked out the CES halls at the Sands / Expo but not the simultaneously running AVN conference in the same building… But some of the exhibtors were going by every so often as we presumably well-adjusted male bots tried not to run into walls…

Today it is just the St. Tropez, which is good because all the Las Vegas traffic congestion between the Alexis Park and the Venetian and LVCC gets to a person after while.

CES 2007 photo dailies: day THREE

Ugh.

Forgot to charge my camera battery last night so Mike as Photographer was down a few hours and wasted then time to get to and from the show [which is significant: the bus arrived a few minutes after I got to the front of the hotel, but took 25-30 minutes to get to the show. Getting back… the busses had stopped running, so it was a taxi, which took 15 minutes or so. Then there was the time in-between that it took to really acknowledge that I was indeed [somehat dull-wittedly aka stupid ] SOL with a drained battery and even if the Canon exhibit at the show did have one of these batteries, and had them for sale, and I could find their exibhit - it too would likely need to be charged]. First time a battery died with only one day’s use. But it was 1000 photos or so…

So this meant that I did not get a lot of pictures of the main conference today. Mostly got pictures of the 3rd and 4th floors at the Venetian and did the dealer knowledge aquisition thing (hey, we were sober and it was during business hours… this feels so much like it is NOT work that I can only stand to do it a short while… Brain keeps saying : Get back to work! You should be out there taking more pictures and listening to more systems).

So far, nothing has stood out. You can look at a system, and think ‘this system with speakers designed like X and driven by Y might have associated problems A, B, and C’. And it does and they do.

CES 2007 - Day TWO

Wow. Big show. Don’t have time to uploads too many photos right now, but I’ll put a few of the Lamm ML3 up on the the DAY 1 dailies…

CES 2007 Day 1 photos