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)

     You can pinch pennies any way you want, but bringing your company to the Consumer Electronics Show is like rolling the dice. You need to pay for the room or booth, of course, but you also need travel for yourself and your staff, shipping for your gear (plus brokerage if you're coming from anywhere but the USA), plus hotel rooms, food, vehicle rental, printing of brochures, signs and everything else. Will CES bring you back that money is sales? As we said...it's rolling the dice.
     That's especially true because Las Vegas is no longer the cheap town it once was. Low-priced digs (the Stardust, the Holiday Inn) are being bought up and torn down to make room for the latest mega-casino and Cirque du Soleil venue.
     But we'll be there, of course, because it's our job, and you can expect the usual daily reports, complete with pictures.
     The bulk of CES is at the LVCC (Las Vegas Convention Center), which, large as it was, doubled its size four years ago specifically for CES! Even so, there are external pavilions, temporary aluminum quonsets in what are normally parking lots.
     However LVCC is not the whole show, nor -- from our viewpoint -- the most interesting one. Most high end companies are at The Venetian (that's it in our night scene above), which is right on the Strip. That includes the rooms up in the tower (the most interesting ones, we believe) and the larger salons in the underground passage between the Venetian and the Sands Convention Centre (the Venetian used to be called The Sands until it picked up the pseudo-Italian remake).
     Until last year, the high end audio exhibits had been located at what was known as the Alexis Park, later renamed somewhat pretentiously the Alexis Villas (motel would actually have been a more honest description). High end exhibitors still talk nostalgically about Alexis Park, forgetting the drawbacks they once whined about: the rooms opened to the outdoors (fun when it rained!), some rooms were up a flight of stairs, making a mockery of the tules about access to the disabled, and the plan seemed to have been drawn up by someone with only an elementary grasp of arithmetic. Even the CES organizers had trouble with the concept. Two years ago, the signs toward the exhibits (one is shown below) had arrows that pointed consistently in the wrong direction.
     From the standpoint of CES, Alexis Park had an even bigger drawback. It's next door to a complex called the St. Tropez, which is where the competing high end exhibition, known as T.H.E. Show, set up shop, with giant signs you can see as your plane is circling the airport. CES wanted that show to die, never to return. What to do?
     And so in 2007 CES sailed away from Alexis Park to the Las Vegas Strip, no doublt figuring that the rebel show wouldn't find affordable housing for its show there, They were right...but T.H.E.Show snapped up Alexis Villas for itself. Whether it can justify the space is something we will soon know.
     Both CES and the other show run four days, January 7th through the 10th. However there is a press day on the 6th, and there is a press event called "CES Revealed" on the 5th. We will be providing daily reports with text and pictures for "Day Zero" and for each of the official days. Each report will be posted either late in the vening or early the next morning, depending on how free our evenings are and where we can jump onto the Internet. "Early" may not mean early for you, of course, because we'll be on Pacific time.
     We hope you'll come and visit with us, as we offer our usual (pretty much unique) take on what's new in high end audio, video, and more or less connected subjects.

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