There is no spoon… I mean… Best of Show.
The Best of Show, if there were to be a best of show this year, was the music vendor room. That carnal lust for more music – that almost irresistible gravitational field sucking me in, making me start leafing through albums was only resisted by walking very quickly past the booths without looking close enough to see the objects of my desire . It was the room where, if we had any room here at all for more LPs, I would have done some real serious damage to the wallet.
Otherwise, there wasn’t really anything I thought really kicked butt, although there were several interesting things that I think made the show very worthwhile for me, anyway, and maybe some of you will think they are pretty cool too. I’ll talk about them in the next few posts.
Traffic/attendance was – experientially – about 10-20% down from last year [although having the new d’Agostino (Krell-founder) amp playing subwoofer rich music extremely loud with the door open a lot probably scared away a lot of people. Sometimes you get good neighbors at these shows – and sometimes not.
Exhibitors seemed more stressed out, attendees seemed more relaxed this show compared with last year.
A LOT of systems were downsized this year – Magico, Evolution Acoustics, Audio Limits, IsoMike, etc. and put even more distance between the state-of-the-art and the average system at this show [not being known for debuting state-of-the-art systems in the first place].
What really set this show apart from the previous years, I think, was that a lot of CES-only diehards finally broke down and attended / exhibited at this show this year [you all know who you are :-)].
Well, that’s ’bout it. Not much to say this year. [yes, we are DEFINITELY looking to spend our efforts on other, up-and-coming shows (Dagogo, Newport, Toronto) next year. ]
On to the more interesting rooms…
