A Dinosaur’s Digital Disappointment

You know, the most exciting thing for me about the all-digital CES this year was bullying my way into being allowed to ‘attend’ as a member of the press. For the Consumer Electronics Show is normally an epic city-takeover of the absurdity of Las Vegas. I have been there when 176,000 people were in town just for that show. I ended up as a scholarship journalist, with flights and hotel paid for as guests of the organisers, twice, when it is supposed to be a one-off!

The peak was 180,000 attendees and 4,400 plus exhibitors.

This year, it was the biggest virtual show the world has ever seen and had around 2,000 companies exhibiting. The breadth and depth of incredible technologies was more than even a team of journalists could ever cover completely. In my time it was always car audio and once or twice, I was able to check out the High End home Hifi section as well. That became a bit separated, geographically, as they always moved stuff around year on year and the exhibitors all wanted to snag you for half a day, so that became less a part of the event for me but reporting on the big Japanese and American car audio companies was brilliant.

But ye gods, the work….. sharing notes with the editor of two airgun magazines, who goes to Vegas (normally) at this time of year, for the show immediately after CES called The Shot Show, his was a different world. He would have a few meetings and then spend evenings getting roaring tipsy with business associates after a day out to the Grand Canyon or what have you. I would have to get words and video from and about everyone. It turned out, according to the PR folks who took me, that I held the record for creating more content than anyone.

But here’s the rub, my world was about how music makes you feel. It was about speakers. Those wondrous devices that made the air move and with it, your soul. It was about a huge pair of Tannoy Westminsters with a small set of JBL studio monitors on top of them that Phil Jones could switch between, for daytime or night time use and how they changed my world. I had been lifting heavy speaker boxes for him as a ‘roadie’ with his P.A. system for bands in pubs and clubs and this was a work meeting one day at his flat. I couldn’t believe my ears and how the things felt to be near. The bass from the JBL’s was ridiculous for their size. He went on to found Acoustic Energy loudspeakers (employing me as production manager) and I went on to work in car audio later.

And CES was the experience of a lifetime, every time. Here is some feel for it.. the TOUCH thing…

Some people went every year, but I couldn’t normally handle it more than every two, as I would return clinically exhausted, with a body clock that refused to correct for six weeks and my own melatonin causing depression! I hated the FOMO in the not-going years though. And back then, my fellow pressmen would be all over the other halls and sending stuff in about the latest TV sets and toys. This was seen on your TVs at home, with the event having global reach. The Las Vegas CES was always about the coolest stuff. And I got my own scoops, too.

Yet things began to change. Alpine were suddenly less about their range of aftermarket kit than all about replacing great slices of folks dashboards in Pickup trucks, with better quality than OEM switches and all. The show gave their most prestigious award for car audio, not to a CarPlay or Android Auto headunit, but to AUDI! They had a big stand at the back of the North Hall and they were telling the world about a system with a removable tablet. The judges loved it but the system never happened. That was a death knell, to me.

The independents like all shrank away and in the recession year of 2009 I was down to go again and still did, getting some good material and seeing some cool stuff but it was changing. MTX gave me the quote of that year, “We understand there is a recession going on but we have decided not to participate.”

And 2021 was a different beast. All sorts of stuff presented at various time zones. I made a ready reckoner so as to be able to see at a glance what time Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern or European time was in GMT. And then engaged with the content.

Two thousand exhibitors and all manner and condition of start ups, grouped by region as well as technology field and lots of presentations about new ideas. But my world of car audio was not featured from technology firms but rather Mercedes, and other companies that are all about the overall automotive experience. Which is cool. All the way to awesome but I was the golden eared reviewer and you could not of course hear this ‘live’ this year.

Likewise all the speaker companies seemed obvious by their absence. The story of the latest TV screens was about 4k getting ever more ridiculously bright (Sony’s OLED tellies are 25% brighter this year) and 8k being a thing, along with LCD technology being made smaller and smaller in pixel size by two new generations of diodes – one even more incredibly expensive than the other. But the home cinema thing has been won by the sound bar. There were some multi-driver bars with speakers pointing in all directions, that are actually licensed as Dolby Atmos, which makes me sad. No matter how cool a single box is at spraying your walls and ceilings with sounds to reflect to get to you, it is like pretend cream versus real dairy. Just unsatisfying despite all the candy calories. One Chinese maker had a novelty. A sound bar you could SPLIT INTO TWO AND CREATE A STEREO PAIR.. WOW!!! I all but wept…..

There were some press releases sent to me that I found gripping in utterly new directions and therein lies some stuff I really want to follow up. One was an offline reader device for documents that can help the literally illiterate, whatever the cause. Dyslexia or lack of schooling for traveller kids is real and this does NOT need to be online connected to work. So I shall follow that up. Another was a blood sugar monitor sensor that didn’t need to be subcutaneous. There are lots of clever insulin sensors that a diabetic can ‘wear’ and get a continuous monitoring of their blood sugar. They all require the skin to be pierced and stay with a sensor stuck through your skin. MeJulie has her fifty-year medal as an insulin dependent diabetic and so I am an empirical expert on the difference between blood sugar reading at a moment and a trend. It can read fine but be dropping like a rock and you just measured it at that point. I reckon I could offer some useful feedback on that.

And Mr. Shapiro, the boss of the CTA said when I asked him what he found most exciting, at the scholarship journalist meeting in Vegas, he told me ‘sensors’. And he was right, for the sensor is the only way input can get to advanced devices. So the last really cool thing was not ‘advances’ in LIDAR technology but rather a couple of major step-changes in LIDAR sensor costs and engineering capacity. This was a couple of companies and one in particular bragging that they had the lowest price LIDAR coming in bulk for autonomous vehicle products because of large economies of scale at last. This is about self driving cars becoming real, for the LIDAR is the sensor that sees with laser. Like laser radar.. hence LIDAR. The whizzy things you may have seen on to tops of odd-looking Google autonomous test vehicles.

So enormous apologies for not burning the midnight oil and there will be some interesting stories coming I hope, but just not from any car audio or speaker companies at Vegas. And tragically, I am a sound engineer by profession, what they call a Noise Boy in Rock N’Roll.

This.. this is my thing… lol

The one easier thing is that the digital resources are all in place until February 15th, making it all easier to go check stuff.. so I will go do just that!