Hope to see you all at CES next week!
If not, well, then, maybe in 2012.
With the years passing faster than… well, I still catch myself thinking it is still 2009… the phrase “see you soon!” has a whole new meaning.
Take care, all!
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:
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]
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… 🙂
Dear Santa,
The following is the list of things you seem to have forgotten to bring me this year [I understand the economy is rough; but seriously, could you make sure you don’t have a few items in your sleigh that you forgot to deliver last night???]:
1. 100,000 mint condition LPs, across multiple genres and in order thank you, all previously Loricrafted with the 4-step Walker Prelude cleaning process. [if not this year, perhaps next Christmas?]
2. Enough Nordost ODIN, Jorma PRIME and Audio Note PALLAS to cable out all 3 of our rooms [and maybe the 4th we are thinking of adding] in either 100% pure ODIN (or PRIME or PALLAS) and in any kind of mixed-cable madness we might want to hear someday. [perhaps this is just stuck in the chimney? I’ll go look.] [Nope. Doesn’t seem to be there. Hmmmmm… Not sure what the problem is here.]
3. A blank check and the name of reputable and competent contractors to add several rooms to our house for the following speakers, one pair for each room. which we would also appreciate very much if you could deliver ASAP: Marten Momentos, Kharma Grand Exquisites (and/or Midi Grande Exquisites), Wilson Alexandria II, Acapella Sphaeron, Audio Note Sogon (at least ONE of these new rooms has to have corners for the AN speakers, unlike our current house), [Oh, and FedEx or UPS is OK, too, if, you know, Rudolph and the other reindeer are a little pooped from last night’s hectic delivery schedule].
4. 1000s of free plane tickets – which come with free room and board at the Boulderado, so that we can fly in everyone who wants to hear their favorite music on any or all of the above setups. [or. hey, you can just fix the real-estate mess, make everyone giddy in the process, and get us a place in the big city. You know, a city that people are already traveling to in the normal course of living their lives?]
Well, Santa. Four things on my list. Not so bad. You’re doing a great job so far, and we know World Peace is not something you can help with, but it seems to me that the items on this list are exactly the kind of things you are so awesome at.
But please HURRY; because right now Neli thinks *I* am Santa, and boy oh boy, this list is going to take me some amount of time to work through…
Happy Holidays, Santa [and to all of you out there, too! Happy New Year!]
