Old One Eye's CES Report
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First, I would like to say thank you to some of the people who made this report possible. First, to my lovely wife who has put up with my yearly trips and was brave enough to accompany me this year (for the first and last time I think). Next, to all those in the industry who helped me out by providing me with the info needed to make an accurate and complete report. This would include Phil Bunch and John Marsh at Esoteric Audio, Wayne Harris of Rockford Fosgate and dB Drag Racing, Paul DiComo at Polk Audio, Manville Smith at JL Audio, Arleen Yamayoshi at Kenwood, Manny Kitagawa at MTX, Kennedy Gammage and John Durbin at Directed Electronics, and Brian Kelsey and Larry Frederick at Phoenix Gold.
A special thanks also to Wayne Newton at the Imation booth (yeah, that’s what his badge said, except he wasn’t like a billion years old) who was kind enough to comp me a superdisk for my pops computer. If I missed anyone, I’m sorry.
Well, my biggest shocker was the dump that I stayed in, the Maxim. Last year, I stayed at the Motel 6 by the Las Vegas airport and paid about $50 a night. The Maxim was more and it was in worse shape. For next year, I definitely know where not to stay. Our room looked like something out of the beginning of the movie Casino, when the mob owned Las Vegas. The wallpaper on the wall was of an aerial view of Vegas, from the 70’s before any of the big casinos were put up.
What was the biggest trend at the show? Bringing a VW Beetle seemed to be one of them. Everyone and their mom seemed to have a Beetle in their booth. For the most part, most looked poor in my opinion. One of the worst would probably have to be the ones at the Orion booth (filled with cobalt and sporting a wall of bass (what is this, the 80’s? A wall?!?!?)). Up there in terms of ugliness would have to be the one in the KEF/Coustic booth (the install sounded quite nice, but it had a 5.25 mounted almost vertically in the middle of the dash as well as taking up the back seat with exposed amps). If your going to spend all the money on a car, why not do a nice, sanitary job instead of taking up the back seat and making the car impractical (hell, if you send a rep to demo the damn thing, where is he going to put his bags? No trunk, no back seat?) Another honorable mention for impracticality would have to be the Boston Acoustics Beetle. Again, they took up the back seat. Whoever did the fiberglass work in the car did an A+ job, but taking up the back seat with the amp just isn’t my idea of practical. Best VW at the show? My guess would have to be the one in the Zapco booth. It was competition grade install. A close second would have to be the one in the Installer Institute booth with the built in video screens and lots of cool features. Very flashy, but a very clean install just the same.
Next, it seems everyone is embracing the mobile video. Besides the cars that were obviously IASCA cars, it seemed that just about every fancy car had some type of mobile video included in the installation.
Another trend that seems to have taken hold is the Ground Zero-type fat surround on subwoofers. It seemed that almost everyone is jumping on this bandwagon (for God knows what reason, since they usually require a bigger amp to push, and are usually very inefficient). Hifonics, ESX, Earthquake, Orion, and Crunch to name a few were showing some sort of fat surround subwoofer.
Another trend that continues is people with no respect for other people’s stuff. The dB dragracing booth got its two CD stolen from underneath three or four people’s noses (this was the stuff being used to help sell the organization, not like he had 100 of them in a pile to sell). At the Phoenix Gold booth, they had a lowrider (more on this in the PG section). The owner of the lowrider had to have his wife sit the entire time near the car to make sure nobody would mess with it (which they did… seems that people will pull, tug or slam it if you take your eyes off of them for a second). Between touching the thing and running up against it with bags, briefcases and other stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy doesn’t come back with his ride. Its too bad, since year after year people treat shit like they own it and then the owner is the one who ends up paying (or show attendees if you think about it, since sometimes cars are not shown because the owners know what to expect and just don’t have time for it).
I would also like to wish a early farewell to DIVX. Rest in peace, you bitch. Sales of DVD have been taking off while DIVX is going the way of the DCC and the betamax. Lets see, you want me to pay about $100 more, pay every time I watch the movie after the initial viewing, give big brother the ability to know what I’m watching, not be able to have all the different versions and aspect ratios and have less selection in movies? Why the hell would I do that? Hopefully the DVD format will take off and leave DIVX in the dust, and it appears that some major companies are putting all their might behind DVD (including Sony, who is one of the leading manufacturers as well as owning the rights to lots of good movies).
Some of the biggest thing in the home high end at the CES show was The Home Entertainment Show (or THE Show). CES is held in the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Hilton next door, the Sands Convention Center and the Alexis Park (where the high-end stuff usually is being demoed in hotel rooms). Anyway, someone came up with the idea of having a competing show next door to the Alexis Park. It seems that CES is too expensive and THE show could give you similar exposure at half the price. It didn’t work out as planned, but it’s a good idea I would guess. Either way, most of the home audio stuff there bored me to tears, so I ran through all of it in a total of about 3 hours (both the Alexis Park and THE show next door) with time enough to demo a cool chair I’ll talk about later. Some of the people who paid for the CES show are pissed to say the least that they want to get all the benefits of CES but not have to pay the price.
Some other interesting stuff was Ericsson was giving away cellular phones in the booth. I didn’t get a chance to head over but I saw a few people busting them out so it must have been true.