CES 2011 Show Report: THE Plan

The Plan…

What is the plan?

The general plan is to post a photo for each room – with little or no comments for most of them and, like the RMAF 2010 show report, to focus on The Few, The Interesting. I figure 200 or so rooms… that is a lot of posts [but not very many photos 🙂 compared to the 4000 or so for last year :-)))))]. We’ll see.

As far as what will be the interesting rooms…

I described a few general points about some general rooms in a previous post for the 29th floor, hallways 100 and 200. That seemed to bore people pretty good… 🙂

So… let’s talk about The Cool. The Not Boring.

============== THE VENETIAN (CES) =============

Maps of CES proper are here:

CES 2011 Show Map

Click on the floors in the Venetian to see maps of the high-end audio rooms. As more and more people move from the ballroom floors to the towers, we only have a few left on the Venetian ballroom level 2 (Move the mouse over each room to see who is in the room):

Mostly YG Acoustics, Thiel, Usher, Parasound, and a few others. YG might be interesting, and there are some rooms that are on hold – maybe somebody interesting might show up there.

On floor 29, it looks like

* Perfect8 is in a bigger room this year in 29-335. They had the $200K or so glass speakers last year – here’s hoping they use different electronics this year.

Zooming in on floor 30 [by clicking the + in the lower left, which doesn’t increase the size of the miniature mouse-over text. Some programmers suck at their job :-(. And the only way get back to the main map of the Venetian is to reload the page] we can see that:

* Marten is in 30-130 [it will be good to hear how the Coltrane 2 speakers do in this modest sized room],

* Kondo is in 30-224 [let’s hope they bring speakers their electronics can drive AND which have the ability to render subtle transients and harmonics],

* Zanden is in 30-317 [they almost always pair their electronics with excellent speakers], the

* Lotus Group in 30-319 [hope they bring their new speakers, either the statement or the new more modestly priced ones will do]

Don’t see much on floor 34 [Emm Labs will be in the isoMike room, but so will the Sony speakers that Ray Kimber takes every year], but floor 35 has

* Lamm in 35-309 and 35-307 [with the Wilson Alexandria X2 speakers]

* D’Agostino [founder of Krell] has his own room in 35-210 [this might be quite interesting to see what he is up to now]

============== THE FLAMINGO (THE SHOW) =============

And then we have T.H.E. Show at the Flamingo:


The hotel is confusing like all Vegas strip hotels. Follow the green lines I scribbled on the map… Registration and most of the large room are downstairs – use the escalator as indicated. Most of the rooms are up on, what looks like floors 3,4 and tower 1 and 2 this year. Use the elevators to get there.

Looking at the exhibitor list [the room maps do not seem to list who is where, except for those in the 5 or 6 suites]

The Show Las Vegas Exhibitors

Well, there is:

* Audio Note and us 🙂 in room 4000

* The David Berning in 4041 [nice amps. Hope the rest of their system highlights them to best effect]

* Jadis will be showing in Conference room E [first time they have been at a show in awhile]

* Magnepan & Bryston in Conference Room A [they had an interesting room a few years ago at the Alexis. Here’s hoping they do again]

* NFS Audio [Not For Sale. Where the party is. Next door to us. Oh boy :-)]

There are, of course, many other ‘potentials’. We’ll just have to see… I mean hear… 🙂