… more or less done. Spelling and factual corrections will be added over time – but the jist is now there….
This year we have up approximately 1000 detailed pictures – with the commentary about each room that stood out in some way right there with the picture. Finally, we have our usual ‘Best of Show’ lists in the ‘Official Report’.
Enjoy!
Mike & Neli
This year we tried to get to as many rooms as possible and are putting up as many of those pictures we took as were in focus and interesting.
Each picture has to cropped, resized and, often, tweaked (the Canon Rebel XL has real problemd with dark rooms and resolving shades of gray) in Photoshop.
One thing I came away with is just how much stuff is out there and how much effort everyone puts into their room – almost everyone brings a LOT of stuff to the show.
Next is to try and annotate each photo with technical details and any listening impressions we may have had.
In general our show reports tend to be more ‘experience-oriented’ (i.e. ‘what were these people thinking?’ or ‘the soundstaging is positioned in an arch above the speakers’) rather than ‘brochure-oriented’ (i.e. ‘the price per watt exceeds the national average of MOSFET-based amplifeirs by 100,000,000.6%…’). It was my fustration with the ‘brochureware’ that was passing for show reports in Stereophile that led me to start writing these show reports in the first place.
And, yeah, I am still sick as a dog (do dogs really get so sick?) and kind of ‘out of it’ – so here is the deal:
If you disagree with what I write, then I was mad with fever when I wrote it and didn’t know what I was saying. If, however, you do agree with what I have written, then I was recovering nicely and in complete control of my mental facilities – inasmuch as one is ever in control of such a thing.
Where is everybody? We’re here, where’s everybody else?
Due to a misunderstanding, we thought that T.H.E. Show was its usual 5 days, and that it would end on Monday, not Sunday at 6 (which was more like 4:00 as everybody was packing up early).
Oops.
Ever year we usually stay at the MGM Grand and walk to the Alexis Park and back once or twice a day… it is about a 25 minute walk each way and is only a pain if we (me) forget to bring a coat, because the show ends each day after dark, at 6:00 pm, and it cools down fast here in the desert. Then it turns into a 20 minute walk.
But after 2 days at the MGM Grand, in a tiny little room costing an embarrasingly large amount of money each day – Neli managed to find a couple of vacant rooms at the Alexis and we did the move on Saturday morning.
Anyway, so here we are, staying unwittingly a extra day for no good reason. Outside there is the ringing of pipes all day long as they tear down the tents that covered all the walkways – just in case it rains or snows or, who knows, it might get a blazingly hot 100 degrees here at CES one of these years.
And now I caught a cold (I am so happy it decded to pay me a visit AFTER CES). So I stay here in the room, coughing and wheezing – apparently working on the show report (I mean, seriously, what else is there to do when laid up with a nasty cold in a hotel room?) on this laptop (that is 10 times slower than my PC with its 4 GB of memory, Raptor disk, Radeon X1800XT 512MB video card…. argh)….and Neli goes shopping (she says she is trying not to get the same bug that has me by the throat…).
Day 4 is about done, and I am starting on Day 1. Kind of backwards, but Day 4 was fresh in my mind – and, well, we were the ones that thought the show was 5 days instead of 4 – so you just have to expect that mixups like doing Day 4 before Day 1 is to be expected here at the Belfry.
This year we tried something a little different – trying to see every single room. Didn’t make it – still missed Ray of Sound, Cabasse, and one of te Magico rooms – and who knows how many others. But we did see a LOT more than we usually do. Wow. There is a lot of interesting technologies and people at this show. Hopefully we can convey some of the color and bewildering numbers of really pretty darn good equipment that was being shown at CES ths year.
