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<B>The Alexis Park</B><BR>
Packing for Vegas, I assured my wife that it might be cold but it would be a <I>dry</I> cold. Unfortunately, this has absolutely no truth when it is raining cats and dogs, so I stumbled into Quartet Marketing's room chilled and soaked. I felt as though things couldn't get any worse&mdash;and I was right. Stirling Trayle pulled a long espresso out of his <I>machinetta</I> and settled me down in front of a pair of the $1150/pair Amphion Heliums Robert J. Reina reviewed in the January <I>Stereophile</I>. Go juice and music: life immediately got better.

One of the themes of the 2005 CES, which we touched on in our first day's coverage, regarding Thiel's new version of its best-selling PowerPoint loudspeaker, is the increasing importance of the custom-install market to manufacturers best known for their two-channel products.

"Don't be shy," Jon tells me.

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.

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&ndash;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 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&mdash;but a few high-end companies make announcements as well.

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."