home entertainment 2007

As you will have
found from reading
Stereophile’s
live on-line coverage
of the 2007
Consumer Electronics
Show, held in Las
Vegas last January—see
http://blog.stereophile.
com/ces2007—the venue for
high-end audio at the annual
Consumer Electronics Show
has been shifted from the
motel-like Alexis Park Hotel
to the rooms and suites of
the Venetian Hotel and Casino.
It will take a while to
learn the Venetian’s lanes
and byways, but some audiorelated
problems are already
apparent. Most of the larger
rooms, on the meeting-room
floors, suffer greatly from a lack of isolation
(separation was provided by
flimsy, movable partition walls),
strange proportions (in most, the greatest
dimension was height), tray ceilings
(read: chancy and irregular room
modes), and a general lack of acoustic
considerations.
One of the best-sounding of those
rooms was chock-full of Echo Buster
products. Head Buster Michael
Kochmann said that he was getting
many requests for his products, and
while he would have loved to have had
them displayed in many rooms, he
needed all he had for his own display.
Others had to coordinate their demos
with their neighbors: simultaneous adjacent
demos would have meant cacophony
for all. It was great to see our
friends playing nicely with each other.
There was more cause for optimism
upstairs at the Venetian. The larger
suites were the sites of some really
great demos, such as that of the new
TAD Reference One loudspeakers, in
a multichannel system of staggering
proportions. Even the smaller rooms
were, on the whole, more acoustically
friendly than those at the Alexis. Still,
as usual, there were winners and losers,
suggesting that demonstrators with
setup talent will always make a better
showing. But the best aspect of the
MUSIC IN THE ROUND
Kalman Rubinson
The 2007 CES & the Mark Levinson No.433 power amplifier
Editor John Atkinson photographs a very proud Kevin Voecks as he shows off his new
Ultima Salon2 speaker and the award received from Stereophile for the
Revel Concerta F12, one of our “Budget Products of 2006.”
new venue, in my opinion, is that the
Venetian’s wide variety of accommodations
could draw back to a single central
site companies that for years have
exhibited off-site at other hotels.
I didn’t see much progress in multichannel
audio-only sound at CES.
There were a few multichannel demos,
but for the most part the high-end
audio industry seems to be marking
time while it waits for a new
audio/video
format to take
center stage.
Having been
burned by
investing in
the hardware
for SACD and
DVD-Audio,
the specialtyaudio
industry
is letting the
big boys and
the mass market
figure out
what that format
will be.
Sure, Dolby
and DTS each
offer a lossless, high-resolution, multichannel
format eminently suited to
serious sound for both Blu-ray and
HD DVD, but until the war being
fought over hi-rez
video formats is
resolved, high-end
audio manufacturers
and the major record
labels are content to
watch from the sidelines.
There was notable
interest at CES in
wireless audio and
video transmission.
Driven mostly by
modish interconnectivity
issues, wireless
transmission can
have great impact on
multichannel audio.
In most domestic
environments, where
to run the necessary
wires for just two
channels can lead to arguments; when
the number of channels triples, a family
crisis is almost assured. Following
the 2006 CES, I reported on the development
of 802.11a/g/n-based wireless
audio speakers by Australia’s Avega
Systems. This year, Avega had gone
OEM, but their partner, WebeckMolloy
(www.webeckmolloy.com),
demonstrated the truly high-end wireless
speaker featured in my YouTube
Theta’s Valis processor and Virtu digital amp are digital through and through
using a quartet of S/PDIF-like connectors to link them.
debut (www.youtube.com/watch?v=
MfMWe1G7s10).
Even more relevant to this column
was the demonstration of a complete
www.Stereophile.com, May 2007 37