First day of Stereophile's HE 2006 show is history…

It was relatively quiet.

That was good for me – I could take lots of photos without disturbing too many people.

Zu loudspeaker closeup

We wanted to get through each and every room the first day of the HE 2006 Show – and did except for two arms of three up on the 4th floor, and let’s see, the IsoMike room and another room which was holding formal demos (they had the Kuzma table, not sure what else). I’d say we covered around 80% of the rooms.

A lot of rooms weren’t completely done setting up, even by the end of the day.

The sound was really mixed, nothing overwhelmingly good or bad.

The best rooms so far were the likely suspects…

Lamm / Wilson
Audio Aero / WLM
MBL / MBL
Sonics / Connoisseur
Venture / Concert Fidelity

A lot of rooms might start sounding great… or they might putter out and crash into a bizzarro world of weird timbres, awful discontinutities, spectral warps and bright lights on a contagious hangover.

We’ll see!

I mean hear! of course.

Well…, both.

But everything was so cold….

Show opens in 3 hours or so for the Trade and Press

The rooms are a little small here at the show’s Sheraton Gateway Hotel – at least the one we are sleeping in, with unusual accoustics in both upper mids and upper bass areas.

Picture of hotel room

Nice art-deco color scheme though…
Picture of hotel room

It is very cloe to the airport. Out the window of this side of the building, and there are only, really, two sides being tall, wide and thin like this, you can see the airport on the other side of a large parking garage or two:

Picture  looking through our hotel window

In the distance there, one can see planes, and planes taking off… rrrrrrrummmmmmbbbbbllllleeeeee

Picture  looking through our hotel window

Yep, just like the Alexis Park at CES in Las Vegas…

Except a little more humid and less trees 😉

And LAX is a wee bit busier than the Las Vegas airport….

Noise floor? We don’t need no stinkin’ noise floor. “We got the rrrrrrrrumble baby!” [spoken in Telly Savalas’ voice (Kojak, the Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Hereos…). No? Then try Vin Diesel’s voice 🙂 ]