Day 3, Wednesday CES…2008 is it?

Funny, show-to-show, some years are very different, and some are very similar.

Some rooms NEVER change, and some are always experimenting.

Some have new stuff to show, and others just want to reiterate that their stuff still passes muster.

At the main conference at LVCC, things look very much the same. They all seem to be broadening out their product offerings, as opposed to being the ‘best ever for a day’. How many 103″, 105″, 108″ announcements does it take until people grow bored. We are up to 150″… How about wall-sized LCD high-res monitors that do not give off much heat and cost about 2 grand?

But to stop digressing… there were a number of ‘retro’ offerings at the show… olde-looking radios and turntables. Can’t be long until the consumer starts looking to get something real… hopefully.

At the high-end audio part of the show, well, I’ve more to see, but like the main show, it seems like one of evolution, not revolution, of companies broadening their offerings. Cable companies adding turntables, turntable companies offering solutions for different arms, etc.

Face it, just about every company on earth now offers an iPod docking solution. That market is what they call saturated. And even more are offering media server solutions – though some are calling it media distribution solutions, blah blah blah. Where you store the media, who has the licenses, how you get it in the system, how you get it to the speakers, what GUI the user uses to access the media [what people really care about, oh, and price/performance], all these details vary slightly from product to product to product…

For example, the number of turntables being used this year seems WAY, WAY down to me. [Is it just our culture that lets teen-somethings set our media and entertainment priorities?] Anyway, the rooms with turntables care about the sound and the music, the ones without care about establishing a beachhead in the new ipodish-marketplace. No good or bad here, just a real bifurcation of rooms at the show, it seems to me.

Oh, and then there are the confused who don’t know what they are doing or why – who ironically are hardly any worse off because of it, since there is a lot of prognostication (guessing) without any real sense of just what IS the best way to stay alive.