The Stereophile CES 2011 Show Report

Stereophile’s show reports are great for checking my facts and figures, and so I leafed through their report last night.

What struck me was that there was hardly any overlap between the rooms I found interesting and their coverage.

Now, it is a truism that magazines focus coverage on rooms that have something ‘new’. Even so, there are a lot of rooms that had new equipment that did not appear in their report – from small manufactures to large, from inexpensive to … not inexpensive.

They do have a ton of info about the rooms / equipment they did cover – and it is kind of fun to read in a dispassionate “oh, that is what they are up to these days” kind of way – but the view of the show from that report is really quite different than that from ours [and I have not found it in me to visit the others just yet].

In some way, I feel that they are trying to be ‘just a little bit more upscale’ than the Sony, Denon etc. coverage of something like, say, CNET. But perhaps this attempt to form a continuous transition from that kind of reader to a more upscale reader leaves out a lot, somehow.