2008 Ad

Sensible Sound, April-May, 2008

As far as I could tell, little changed from 2007. Major companies like JBL, Infinity, Onkyo and Yamaha skipped the show entirely preferring to show at CEDIA. The press corps must have multiplied ten-fold with all the internet websites and bloggers. As a result, the high-end music rooms were overflowing. The fact that almost all the high-end equipment was being demonstrated on three floors of the Venetian hotel (CES organizers made the change from the spacious Alexis Park last year) did not help matters. Even if an intrepid soul could work through the crowd to secure a prime listening spot, it was next to impossible to get listener-selected music played. My specially-prepared CD-R was an especially hard sell for more than a minute or two (playing chamber music is a good way to clear a room). It is easy to make a speaker sound good by using specifically selected material the manufacturer has chosen. How the speaker sounds with your source material is the key at a trade show or at a dealer's showroom.

Worse, some demonstrations were run off hard drives on a computer. Running off a hard drive was claimed to produce less jitter although I do not agree. The demonstrators explained they had no CD player on the equipment rack thus locking anybody out of using demo material they brought to the show. Some reviewers said they would bring a USB stick loaded with their personal reference material to work around this problem for CES 2009. My thought is to skip CES 2009 in Las Vegas completely.

As for SACD, the Sony car audio demo was the only place I could listen to my SACD test material in multichannel. Hooray for Sony for supporting SACD. The reps at the booth claimed multichannel audio makes more sense in a car where one is constrained to listen instead of watch as in a home theater. I hope this model succeeds. The small fraction of us who listen at home can "ride along with the trend."

--DAR