by Michael

Jeff Day's CES 2008 Show Report at 6moons

[We are still at the Alexis Park, scheduled to leave in a few hours, missing, hopefully, some nasty weather that was imposing itself on travelers yesterday.]

Jeff Day’s show report is interesting, and disturbing in a couple of ways.

First, it looks like I missed a couple of rooms [in particular Sander’s room with his new InnerSound-ish speakers and his immediate neighbors. Damn. Twice in that area of the St. Tropez I had to stop photographing because the 3 2GB memory cards I use were all filled up. Next year… more cards. Or bigger cards.]

Second, there is this quote:

“The Soundlabs are even bigger than the Klangfilm Bionars, which is amazing in itself. The Soundlabs are so big in fact that I couldn’t get far enough away to get the two front channel speakers into the lens of my iPhone. The rear channels were equally astonishing. If you have a really big wallet and a really small thingy, these babies will compensate for both. Guaranteed. For those of us with a modest wallet and a big thingy, look elsewhere.”

Ignoring the judging of speakers on the focal length of the iPhone camera with respect to the size of the exhibition room [hey, we’ve all seen people evaluate the performance of a product based on all manner of weird stuff. Whatever…], and people’s fascination about the length of this particular appendage on other people [no, no, large penises are a fine thing] – the idea of critiquing the character of the owners of a product, instead of the product itself, besides being content-free and distracting from the matter at hand e.g. the sound of a room at a show, is, in my opinion, a prime example of the decline of the professionalism of the professional journalists not only in our industry but across the board.

Although this is a new low, there have been other instances where very popular reviewers have made comments that are overly bold, aggressive, and incorrect or unsubstantiated. For example: “full range speaker X does not go much below 40Hz”, or “CD player Y is inferior to its competition vis-a-vis its red book performance”. Tell us how you measured the output of the speaker [but, oh, the magazine that eschews measurements]. Tell us how you moved the speaker around to try and get it out of the room nodes. With what speakers are you comparing the low-end to with respect to the energy expected from a speaker in this room. etc. etc. And similarly, what players are you referring to with better red book? In what WAY are they better?

Anyway, I’m not sure we are going to start naming names here but we do try to avoid sweeping stupidities here at Audio Federation, and do try to talk about the SOUND of things, and WHY certain things are superior or inferior examples of various qualities desirable from the point of view of a system designed for music reproduction.

If we ever succumb to the prevailing malaise with respect to replacing straight talk with sensationalistic flame bait, like saying something like… oh… that 99% of reviewers are clueless or whores [thanks F.C. :-)] when the number is really closer to 90%, please PLEASE let us know.

in CES 2008 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Show Reports / Sounding Off 0 comments
 by Michael

CES 2008 Winds Down…

Took about 4400 photos it looks like. 8 DVDs full. All 3 shows, or 4 locations depending on how you look at it.

Will try and get some photos and commentary each day as we spend tonight and tomorrow packing and Saturday driving back.

Oh, and sleep.

It was a upbeat show – but nothing too spectacular. Well, the Lamm ML3 but that was on the Wilson MAXX II which requires some listening around – and besides, it will take years to get the full measure of these amps – which doesn’t mean we didn’t hear things that shed light on how music can and should be reproduced.

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 by Michael

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.

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