Ahh… closure. It’s a wonderful word. Las Vegas grinds to a complete halt for the four days of the Consumer Electronics Show 2007, because the show spreads over dozens of hotels and convention centres. It’s impossible for one, two, even a team of people to see everything, because there is so much to see.
There’s even a show outside the show. Called The Home Entertainment Show, it works as a high-end specialty audio satellite show to the CES and is run from the San Tropez hotel, about a kilometre from the main Strip. As a consequence, attendance is lower than the packed stands at the Las Vegas Convention Center or the Venetian hotel rooms. But the quality is still high, with companies like Copland and Audio Research demonstrating the best in valve-based hi-fi. There were also more down to earth hi-fi products off the Strip, like the Cambridge Audio, with its new 740A amp and 740C CD player, designed to fit between the company’s budget 640 and upmarket 840 ranges.
Mordaunt Short (Cambridge Audio’s brother in arms) also announced a wholly new product line to build upon its existing strengths. Called Alumni, the 5.1 channel subwoofer/satellite speaker system uses the company’s own Continuous Profile Cone speaker drivers to deliver a “little home cinema speaker that thinks big”, according to the company’s own literature.
Rotel continued to build upon its reputation for high quality audio and video with additions to its ever-popular ranges. Among the useful new products, the company’s new Video Enhancer (effectively a video scaler, with full HDMI support) is set to make any DVD player fully HDTV ready.
Perhaps the most exciting development to stereo CD and SACD replay (remember them?) came from UK digital specialist Dcs. The company’s new four-box Scarlatti system managed to dig out unparalleled detail from the silver discs. It may cost as much as a Mercedes Benz, but the high-end audiophiles were walking out of the demonstration room with huge smiles on their faces.
Last, there was RCA, the US arm of Thomson. This is very much a mass-market brand in the USA, with a wholly different line-up of products compared to the main French brand. Its giant expo stand was filled with small radios, big televisions and more. It was keen to impress its long-standing within the consumer electronics market, and one of the best ways of doing this is putting a girl on a Harley with a RCA logo on the tank. Well… it works for us!
In sum, this year’s CES left people with mixed messages. There were a lot of new products on show (especially 1080p HDTV ready flat screens), but not a lot of wholly new innovations on offer. For once, it was strong on substance instead of being full of tomorrow’s technologies that may or may not make the grade. There was also the increasing interest of media companies like Disney in hardware. Most of this interest is geared to getting broadband video to users in the home or on the phone (and subsequently overshadowed by the launch of the Apple iPhone at a rival expo). For now however, the home cinema and big flat screen market is maturing, and people are still getting the benefit of ever better and ever cheaper products.
After all this, you leave the show exhausted and bewildered. Or perhaps that’s got something to do with the gaming tables and martinis. Or maybe the Adult Video News convention and awards that’s just beginning as the CES ends… whatever, by the end of four hectic days in Vegas, it’s hard to get a grip on reality.