May 30, 2015June 17, 2015 by Michael

Newport 2015 Show Report Index

Adding this index now to try and make it easier to manage the chaos of all these photos and see what rooms are up. The hotel internet bandwidth is a little less broadband-y this morning…

Update: show’s over. Think there are photos of just about everything. Now to get them all here in the report…

This was the hardest I’ve had to work to get every component in every room photographed. Even back in CES’s heyday, when I had to do the hour walk between the Alexis Park and the Venetian, it wasn’t this intense. Part of the problem is that the new ‘Industry Day’ is useless for me because a significant portion of the rooms aren’t set up yet – so any photographs I take then will just have to be done over when they finally get done setting up [i.e. at CES there are 4 days… here there are only 3 to get all the rooms visited and photos taken].

Otherwise, this hotel [the Hotel Irvine] rocks. Exhibitors like the rooms better than most of the other shows and, the kicker, the hotel staff goes out of their way to help make it a pleasant, successful experience for everyone.

… and………………….. we’re back.

The Extraordinary Delay 1/3 way through this show report

Sorry about the extraordinarily long delay. [We were staying at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe and they had recently installed a new wireless internet system with great [sic] new routers and, unfortunately for us, a new load-balancing system. To balance the load across all the routers [each of the, say, 20 buildings, had its own router] it would disconnect everybody every 20 seconds or so, and then reconnect them to one of the other routers. The real problem for us was not just the way this load-balancing scheme was poor, from any number of viewpoints, but that everybody was having a hard time getting them to do anything at all to fix it. ]

The rooms at this hotel

This show was a good show. The vast majority of rooms got good traffic, were fairly easy to setup [Klaus (Odyssey Audio) had the worst room to setup in; and rooms like ours which were a larger version of his were also more difficult than just blapping down the speakers in the usual position].

Maybe it was that this hotel is only 4 months old, but the rooms just felt better, more robust – the hallways wider, more easy to navigate.

The staff at this hotel

The hotel staff went out of their way to help. The cleaning people were cheerful [albeit with life-problems like the rest of us]. When they had insufficient staff to deal with room service on both Saturday and Sunday mornings [We had to let the phone ring for 10 minutes to place an order, and the order itself arrived about a half hour later (not too bad for most hotels, but with these guys it usually took 15 minutes or so)], the room service breakfast was delivered free of charge. [They delivered the breakfast in sealed tubs in a slightly upscale paper bag to the door of our hotel room, much nicer than having them wheel in, or carry in, a breakfast tray – less invasive of our privacy and we didn’t have that awful chore of having to find a spot to clear away to make room for any breakfast tray…:-) ]

Our lost crate and, yes, they found it 🙂

The guys working for 5Logistics, who manage the shipping to and from this Newport Show, and RMAF, put one of our very large creates [containing the horns for the speakers] we did not know where. So I spend 4 hours and Neli 6 wandering around the halls of the hotel looking for where they put them. Although we did learn where everything was, got to see all 14 floors, the loading dock, the service elevator rooms (on all 14 floors) and the Mezzanine (where the hotel offices were secreted) we still managed to omit the building out beyond the pool where Headphonium was being setup – and where our crate had been miss-laid. After a somewhat sleepless night [Neli was trying to figure out what we were going to do with a room with horn-less speakers ], they found them for us late the morning of the ‘industry day’ of the show. Yay! 🙂 Hermann from Acapella did spend time the previous day setting up the speakers which still had the frequencies below a couple hundred hertz and about about 5000 hertz – so we just had to attach the horns and do minor adjustments to the setup in the 3 1/2 hours we had before the show opened at 2:00pm.

As we poked our heads during the search phase into almost every large room at the show (multiple times) you would be surprised at how many crates look like your crate but have those annoying differences in size and shape and labeling that make them not your crate. 😉 Thanks So Much to everybody who helped and/or expressed their concern/horror.

Report

159 rooms….

A quick link to this index is always in the sidebar over there —–>

A quick link to the maps…

Newport 2015 Show Report Index

Newport 2015 Show Report Index

Floor 1

Floor 2

Floor 3

Floor 4

Floor 10

Floor 11

Floor 12

Floor 13