What Happens In Vegas

Talk Audio want to thank Midbass, Clarion and TDR distribution for enabling Talk Audio magazine to go to Las Vegas to report on the 2009 Winter Consumer Electronics Show.
Las Vegas is both horrible and awesome. Delightful and yet tinged with nastiness. A real mix of the sublime and the grimy. But then, you could as easily put London or Paris in that context. Yet Las Vegas is living proof in one place at least, that Pyramid selling need never end. Either because the wealthier population of the Earth keeps breeding to send the next generation off to spunk it in Gomorrah, or it’s simply selling rooms in the pyramid shaped icon of the upper strip.
This time around, I stayed on The Crossroads of the Americas at the Excalibur, hated by many Vegas residents as being literally too tacky for words and they’d much prefer it pulled down in favour of another monster new shiny block like the Wynn and Encore.
In the past I have stayed at The Hacienda, (demolished and had the Mandalay Bay built on top at mega cost) the Tropicana, the New York New York, the Luxor and the Golden Nugget. One year Blaupunkt put us up in the Venetian and Pioneer put us in Belaggio.
It was in the Belaggio in the posh eatery overlooking the lake with the hundred horsepower fountains that I had my first meal. Jetlagged to hell and feeling like it was supper time at five AM. It was with the Giddings Boys from Acoustic Wood. In town to see about some electronics (you don’t say) for their business, they were also determined to have a good time and went Quad biking in the desert at one point.
We all got hypothermia, sat on the terrace under outdoor gas heaters as the weather like everywhere, was mad. It was COLD. They had even had that year in Vegas and had needed to drive snowploughs a half hour out of the mountains to go clear it.
But my Vegas trip was all about riding to and fro from the convention centre in shuttle buses on boring roads and reporting live to the site same day. It meant I never saw the strip at all this time. Not once.
Before leaving England, I had to learn a better grasp of the stuff you need to do with files and image sizes and access systems and more techy bits, so I could work from a different time zone straight onto the front page of Talk Audio magazine under “CES Reports” All the makee-learnee adds up to the grown up colouring in by numbers that is the art of web mastery. I’m not fit to be called a Wizard’s Sleeve versus the Web-Sourcerer who sorts my work out for this scale of article but I really tried.
I reported from both airport lounges via public access e-mail terminals and spent time on the machines in the press room. There were camera issues.
No problems at all with the cute wee Lumix grab-shooter that Panasonic had given me for going on a Formula One test day. It had been switched from the five mega pixel setting to 0.3mp and the low resolution file size. It meant I could take the 512mb (aah bless) SD card out of the camera, and pop it in the new card reader I got at Dixons airside in Gatwick and slap ’em straight to e-mail without resizing. All those CES Show report sections dated the early days of January were all shot with the tiny one. Startlingly good.
The Canon ‘Pro-sumer’ PowerShot S3is camera, however, developed a ‘lens fault’ and so died at day two. So day three I was at the factory outlet mall to hit Wolf Camera and got a replacement Canon S10. Unutterably more clever and yet still a device for those of limited skill. It took all the remaining shots and video for the next two days beautifully.
As times were tight, there was no wedge available to go off across town in taxis and check out the parties. They were thinner on the ground this year and yet I did have an invite to the Kicker do which I missed. Muh!
I was too busy with a saddo cheap-n-lonely Clam Chowder in a bread roll on the cobbles of the too-authentic streets of the New York New York hotel that I could walk to from the Excalibur. I say too real as it had genuine homeless folks wandering around looking for food in clothes they had slept in for months. One even had…nastier details have been edited out here as it was too yuk.)
But the opportunities at the show itself to meet old mates in the twelve volt world and nag some new ones was just bloody wonderful. I met up with Todd Ramsey, an American who came to Europe for a bit and gave the UK the tale of the 33Hz CRF. He’s a serious training company consultant now and works for the CEA itself sometimes. I met Tom Walker of AudioControl again and hand delivered the sweeties I was waving in that video a month back, (AudioControl send out Christmas gifts of a slice of Pike’s Place Fish Market smoked salmon from Seattle every year. Tasty! I reply with English Toffee by Farrah’s of Harrogate.)
I caught up with David Thompson of MMats, whose Room Of Doom once took me by surprise with a 150dB bass barbecuing one year ages ago. It triggered the line of thought that resulted in the cartoon BoomZilla in Car Stereo Son of BoomZilla. (Both cartoon strips about to be unleashed on TA!) Their blue demo car was awesome. All panels opened up in odd directions.
The Clarion Scooby was also blue but had an amazingly more powerful and weight-penalising install in it. A full feature will be coming soon but suffice it to say that twelve twelves in six isobaric shared cubic enclosures drops one hell of a throb.
All really horrid villains in American movies are British and Americans see UK rock stars as the baddest-behaved, too. The Vibe guys had done a top job of marketing this British Decadence and Excess image to the Americans through Metra, with a new division called Vibe USA. For their first publicity hit, they have gone in with three iconic Minis in the required colours and have installed them partly with the assistance of the Installer Institute over there to do the doors and with bass installs made in the UK and shipped to the States. There’s a different range of Vibe kit in each one.
The Black Death range gets its own treatment and along with a wooden legend board about how vile the disease was, they had a Caddy Escalade. The huge themed install meant that it was stripped down to two seats only, so that a dead rotten skeleton could lie full length in the back under an oozing sewer pipe. A full write up of it has also been done with as good a set of images as I could take and will be a separate feature here on Talk Audio magazine as well.
So I was kept busy walking the North halls of the LVCC and shooting the asses off the cars of choice. Also, I was on a promise of a hopeful show report in the hallowed pages of Fast Car but as yet, they haven’t been able to open any of my discs I posted them. (Macintosh ‘creatives, innit?) It gave me excuses to photograph pretty girls and ask them about their Facebook pages. That meant I could put in their proper names and explain how they love puppies and wish to be an astronaut and stuff.
There were less show cars than I have previously seen and a big area of the hall for so-called ‘meeting rooms’ which looked like shell scheme put in to avoid empty space and there were far fewer delegates present than I had ever seen. It was so quiet that folks were apologising for getting in shot and waiting for me to finish a photo before they walked by. It gave the photography an eerie got-in-after-hours look, which is odd as there were over 100,000 visitors altogether.
One visit to a ‘satellite’ exhibitor was to see the US Amps folks. They were simply in a hotel room in the Hilton but had not spent the money booking with the CEA, only having those to see them who they invited directly. Thus it was hard to find them from reception. The lady was like a character from Little Britain USA. The name was on her room list but she couldn’t pronounce it. She was gutted when we DID find out what we wanted to know from her.
There were some lovely products at the show. A mad 34in woofer from Cadence with a delicious babe. Another big one from MTX with more babes and a fabulous Soundstream with no need of a babe. I snapped a lot of heavy USA metal as all the demo cars were domestic not imports, bar Clarion’s and as many lasses as I figured I could away without being slapped by.
The most amazing car was the Galpin Scythe. Launched at SEMA the previous October, it was the baby of Beau Galpin of Galpin Auto Sports or GAS. The one from Pimp My Ride. That room of cars you see the mark arrive to the reveal though is just Beau’s private collection. He runs the biggest Ford dealership in the world and also sells other car brands. A Dollar billionaire (I heard) GAS run three levels of customisation. One, the standard purchaser who can still get high end customised electronics and so forth done pre-delivery by the best. Two, their Big Ticket And Celebrity department that deals with the really flash work. Then Beau set up an extra tier of the best brace of young fabricators he could find and along with Mad Mike they designed and implemented a perfectly mad demo car, scratch built. It houses a dual screen HAL software controlled music system with JL Audio components.
They made a car that cost $990,000!
Carved from a clay-on-a-frame system and then made via moulds and panels just like say GM would when prototyping, the thing is based on a Mustang but has 1000bhp and two steering wheel and pedal sets. The steering wheels are motorised and all functions of the electronics can be controlled by making mobile phone calls to the car. It’s just incredible and you can see the video of how they made it


An amazing privilege, I was allowed to sit inside it and film the bits all moving. The guys who built it are Zahid “Z” Siddiqi and J.D. Hendrikson, known as Zee and JayDee. Both around 25 years old and despite being involved at a level that you might think would turn a young man’s head and make him act all celebrity-struck, were just the nicest guys. How in hell you follow that up, though, I dunno.
Spend more than a million of Beau’s cash next time I guess!
The last day of the show I had a veggie wrap from the press room and it nearly killed me. I ate half the rotting roast pepper nastiness (I had to rely on them feeding me on Bagels for breakfast and what had been a real lunch meal in the past had turned into an apple, a bag of crisps and a ‘wrap’ this year.) I rode a lonely coach with four people back to my room at half three since the show finishes at four on the Sunday these days and then spent the next twelve hours in a fugue of illness, throwing my insides up from four to six hours later.
Nice.
So although professionally exciting, the trip itself was a bit grim round the edges but I still recognise it was a privilege to go and one heck of a statement for Talk Audio to be making in these tough times, sending correspondents to Las Vegas.
What I’d REALLY love to do would be to organise a big old junket trip, with TA acting as tour guide to a posse of TA-ers who’d love to go see CES but need their hands held on the organisation of it all. Any of you fancy seeing Las Vegas next January?
You would have to become ‘News Reporters’ of course, to gain press accreditation…….
And here’s where to click to see a funky cool slideshow in the newly imported gallery system. We LOVE this!
link