2005 CES: Stephen Mejias Day Three
"Don't be shy," Jon tells me.
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2005 CES: Stephen Mejias Day Two
After my first full day of weaving my way around the Consumer Electronics Show, I'm happy to be back in my hotel room, ready to open the laptop and type. I've got a tote bag (everyone has a tote bag) gorged fat with press releases, CDs, magazines, directories, scribbled notes, a fortune cookie. . .. What's going on here? Am I really the newest writer for <I>Stereophile</I>? And what's the deal with this fortune cookie?
2005 CES: Day Two
Every few years the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show turns cold and wet, and it looks like this will be one of those years. Still, audio is largely an indoor activity, and despite chilly, damp weather, ongoing format turmoil, and pressure from home theater, rooms at CES's high end audio venue, the Alexis Park hotel, are hopping as normal.
"Nothing is Real..."
Watching the Beatles <I>Anthology</I> TV shows last Thanksgiving, I was struck by how good recorded sound quality was in the early to mid-1960s and how bad it had become by the era of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/recordingofthemonth/204rotm"><I>Let It Be</I></A>. Early Beatles recordings may have been primitive in terms of production, but their basic sound quality was excellent, with extended response at the frequency extremes and a natural, clean-sounding midrange. Late Beatles recordings lacked highs and dynamic range, and sounded grainy by comparison. This was partly because, by 1969–70, studios had replaced their simple tubed mixing consoles with the first generation of solid-state desks, and their old tubed two-track Studers and Ampexes with solid-state multitrack recorders. These featured track widths so narrow that only the massive use of Dolby-A noise reduction made it possible to produce recordings that had any dynamic range at all!
The Collectible Stereophile
<I>Stereophile</I> is finally collectible. Either that, or I'm the biggest audiophile sucker out there. A few weeks back, I finally caved into temptation and signed up for an account on eBay, the website via which millions of folks buy and sell stuff in an online auction, and on which someone once tried to sell a human kidney. (It was not allowed.)
CES 2005: Day One
The Wednesday before the official start of the CES is traditionally a day devoted to press conferences and room set up and today was no different. Many mainstream companies put on dog and pony shows announcing products they think will answer the mass market's thirst for more and better—but a few high-end companies make announcements as well.
Audio Legends
Everyone knows the story: Isaac Newton got hit on the head by an apple and suddenly discovered the physics of gravitation. Like the one about Archimedes discovering the basics of hydrostatics while taking a bath, this story turns up everywhere. Even Michael Stipe, in R.E.M.'s "Man in the Moon," sings "Newton got beaned by the apple good."
CES 2005 Day One: First Impressions
<I>Editor's Note: Stephen Mejias has never attended CES before, and does not claim to be an audiophile. But he's distinquished himself enough around the </I>Stereophile<I> office that it seemed a good idea to register his first-time impressions of audio's greatest show on earth.</I>
Bel Canto Design DAC 1 D/A processor
It's hard to know what the best strategy is for digital upgrades. Maybe you bought your first CD player when you became convinced that the format was going to succeed, and it seemed that players were about as good as they were going to get. Some time later, you tried one of the new outboard digital processors, and the sonic improvement was such that you just had to have it. Then you replaced the player itself with a CD transport, so you could benefit from improvements in servo control and digital output circuitry. At this point you were generally happy with your digital front-end—until you read about how 16-bit DACs (which is what your processor had) were old hat now that 20-bit DACs were available. But alas, your processor couldn't be upgraded, and was worth maybe 30% of what you'd paid for it. So you took a loss and bought a new-generation digital processor, and things were fine and dandy...for a while.
The Missing Peace Project
We live in a world of strife. Among the many organizations working to change this regrettable fact are the Committee of 100 for Tibet (C100) and the Dalai Lama Foundation (DLF), which together are curating and producing a large-scale <A HREF="http://www.dalailamaportrait.org">art exhibition</A> that will have its official debut at UCLA's Fowler Museum in June 2006. A preview show of <I>The Missing Peace: The Dalai Lama Portrait Project</I> will take place at the Cantor Center for Arts at Stanford University in September 2005, to coincide with a visit to that institution by the Dalai Lama, exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.