CES 2008 and the parallel show run from January 7-10th, with a special press day on the 6th (Day Zero, we call it). Click to visit each of UHF's live reports. The report will appear early the next day, if not before.

CES Preview

Day 0 (Jan.6th)

Day 1 (Jan.7th)

Day 2 (Jan.8th)

Day 3 (Jan.9th)

Day 4 (Jan.10th)

     On this fourth and last day, we were back at the Venetian, mainly to go through the larger rooms, actually salons. Or actually salons subdivided into acoustically awful... but don't get us started.
     We made a discovery that should have come as no surprise. The companies that got bitten by these awful rooms in 2007 booked space elsewhere this year. The upper floor of salons was therefore empty except for meeting rooms. Doing a complete tour didn't take long.
     One company that did come back was MBL, whose latest and largest omnidirectional speaker is shown at right. It's true that a speaker that size would fit only with the greatest difficulty. The fact that that it was accompanied by more amps than a discothèque only emphasized the need for space. This double-height model, by the way, is called the 101X-Treme. It didn't sound natural, and perhaps it wasn't just the room.
     Also back in the hollow-sounding cubes of the Venetian salons was Sunny Cable, whose gigantic speakers would fill a normal room. These are horns, carved from wood, so tall that it is difficult to have line-of-sight to the tweeter. That may not b a practical speaker, though fortunately smaller ones do exist. The big one? It sounds quite nice despite the cube-shaped room, and the stereo image is much better than you would expect from a speaker that size.
     It would have been difficult to count all the turntables that were present and playing this year -- we even spotted a visitor touring with a bag of LPs rather than one of CDs. At least some are ones we have seen before, though not always heard. The strangest one is the Continuum, with its retro-styled Copperhead tone arm (below left).
     Perhaps it's the look of the arm, which looks as though it was lifted from a 1950's Silvertone record player. The first one we ran across, coupled with a VTL preamp, Vitus Audio power amplifiers and Germany Physics speakers, was uninspiring, sounding hollow and harsh in the unfriendly surroundings. The second one was in VTL's own room, and for the first time we have been impressed.
     VTL was in fact playing a lot of vinyl, because it was launching its first-ever high-end phono stage, the TP6.5 (below).
     It is of course a tube unit ("VTL" does stand for "Vacuum Tube Logic," lest we forget). It costs $8500. In the VTL room it was playing with the Continuum turntable already mentioned, VTL's TL7.5 II line stage and S-400 power amplifier, and Wilson Watt-Puppies. We listened to one of the famous old Mercury recordings, Dorati's rendition of Stravinsky's Firebird, and not even the dodgy acoustics could hide the fact that this was a seriously together system.
     We (and probably you) often refer to certain speakers having a "laid back" sound, and so this speaker amused us, because it seems to illustrate that sound with its, um...relaxed stance. It's the Eclipse, from M Acoustics. It wasn't playing, unfortunately, though its much larger (and more alert!) brother was. The sound was about as natural as anything we got to hear in a venue that is itself a crime against nature.
     We got a look at a new and elaborate universal remote control (from Ricavision), the Vave 100, that has way more features than any we have seen before. It works with the company's media centre, essentially a Windows computer that is styled to look like a CD player. Operating on the usual infrared bands as well as radio frequencies, it can pull in music from the computer and play it through its dock (the same dock can accommodate a Microsoft Zune player). It can also take advantage of the "Gadgets" in Windows Vista's Sideshow, providing info such as weather, traffic, movie start times, and so on (Ricavision plans to develop its own list of Gadgets for use with the Vave 100). Because the system has hooks into Vista, it will of course not work with a Mac, with Windows XP, or possibly not even the Home Basic version of Vista, which lacks a lot of Vista's much-advertised features. Oh yes...the Vave 100 is a remote control, and it can be taught to control pretty much any conventional audio component you own, either from the company's database or by "learning" directly from another control.
     We listened to a new (and largest) Eventus loudspeaker, the Nebula. The speakers were driven by electronics that were new to us, with the intriguing brand name of Soulution (yes, spelled like that -- you can see one of the monoblocks below). It might have sounded nearly right but for the annoying sibilance on voices. Don't they check these things?
     The German connector maker WBT was in town, showing some new NextGen products, made with minimum metal. A replacement for the angled 0645 banana is in the works and should appear shortly. Of course it is often asked whether such basic product as a binding post can make an audible difference.
     To answer that, WBT was doing a demo, using a pair of Audio Physic Virgo speakers modified to have three pairs of binding posts. The top pair was the new NextGen post. Just below was the conventional WBT-0780 post, and below those were Asian knockoffs of an even older WBT post.
     This was not a blind test, though it could easily have been set up that way. The superiority of the NextGen was beyond question, yielding superior depth and natural human voice. Both of the other posts brought the sound stage forward flattening it. The no-name posts, additionally, added a synthetic character to the voice that was the sort of thing producers use expensive processors to do. Interesting (and that was the word used by a number of visitors to the WBT room.
     Perhaps we should add that this comparison was done in a hotel suite, not in one of the toxic salons.
     Across from the WBT room was that of Raidho, which was playing its Ayra C3 speakers (at right) to considerable acclaim. Among the recordings we heard was one of percussion and small bells, and both sounded cleaner and more natural than with most speaker. This may be a speaker to keep an eye on. Or at least an ear on.
     There was one more speaker that caught our ear, the newest from Avlon, called the Indra. With its vast soundstage and quick transients, it seemed to justify its projected price (under $20K a pair we are told). Both the midrange and the tweeter are ceramic. The very solid enclosure has the usual Avalon swept-back look.
     Totem was demonstrating its Tribe 3, the thin but long speaker meant to flank a video screen (Vince Bruzzese says he uses a pair to listen to music these days). He may want to ask for a air of The One, a 20th anniversary speaker limited to 2000 pairs. It costs extra because of upscale parts (Mundorf capacitors, expensive wiring, latest and fanciest WBT connections), bring the total cost to $3595. The sound? About as good as it gets.
     Vandersteen was also showing a special version of its flagship speaker, the 5A. The carbon fibre cabinet construction added some $6K to the cost for a total of $21,900. It sounded very good -- no surprise there -- but we were told Richard Vandersteen had expected more difference than he got.
     Boulder was there with its usual very large amplifier, plus a totally new product, the 1021 CD player (at right). We noted the screen, showing the contents of the disc, and assumed this must be a DVD player (Red Book CDs can hold metadata, but few do). No, the 1021 is strictly CD. But like iTunes and some other jukebox programs, it can hook into GraceNote through Ethernet, and find the titles to nearly all CDs. The drive, by the way, is normal computer drive, and the contents of the disc are loaded into memory and played from there, to avoid the artifacts from mechanical parts. Price: $25,000.
     So ended the 2008 editions of the two Vegas shows. There was plenty to see and hear, as we've described (and as we will describe in more detail in UHF No. 83). There were also lots of important companies missing. Whether either CES or T.H.E.Show can pull them back is a topic for the future.
     

[BACK TO DAY ZERO] [TO THE UHF BLOG] [BACK TO THE UHF HOME PAGE]