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As an audiophile manufacturer, the odds are stacked against you getting a great sounding demo up and running under show conditions. The rooms are generally skimpy and oddly shaped, the construction materials and walls unpredictable, and there's the need to set up fast with only what you've thought to pack in.

The Alexis Park

Packing for Vegas, I assured my wife that it might be cold but it would be a dry 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—and I was right. Stirling Trayle pulled a long espresso out of his machinetta and settled me down in front of a pair of the $1150/pair Amphion Heliums Robert J. Reina reviewed in the January Stereophile. 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.

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 Stereophile? And what's the deal with this fortune cookie?

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.

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 Stereophile office that it seemed a good idea to register his first-time impressions of audio's greatest show on earth.

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 art">http://www.dalailamaportrait.org">art exhibition that will have its official debut at UCLA's Fowler Museum in June 2006. A preview show of The Missing Peace: The Dalai Lama Portrait Project 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.