CES 2008

The day before CES opens is designated Press Day, with press conferences scheduled every hour, including presentations by major consumer electronics manufacturers such as Pioneer, Toshiba, Philips, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony. These are extremely well-attended, to the point that last year some of the press conferences were so full that members of the audio/video specialty press ended up being turned away. As Wes Phillips noted in a recent news story, for the 2008 Show CES announced that, to deal with this problem, it would be more stringent in determining who gets a Press badge. While they may indeed have done so, there were still huge crowds at all the press conferences I attended, although I think this time at least all my fellow audio/video writer colleagues managed to get in. (That's www.ultimateavmag.com's Tom Norton in the foreground.)

"Big," I said.

See this man?

The Replay Turntable ($3499) is Revolver's re-entry into the turntable market after a lengthy absence. It comes packaged with a Jelco tonearm although the company might eventually supply a top plate that can be drilled for any arm. It has a decoupled suspension—which is not sprung–and a large flat belt driven by an AC motor with an outboard power supply. At 50 lbs, it's no lightweight.

"You know," Alon Wolf told us. A lot of what you liked about the sound of my music server was the Pacific Microsonics Model Two DAC I was using. But that's no longer manufactured, this is even better and only $5000."

We glanced into Oracle's room to see what was new. We'd seen the Delphi, we'd seen the CD 1500 and CD 2500 before. "Nothing new?" we asked.

The Sony booth had a lot of interesting products on display, but hardly anything specifically dealing with audio. Last year, the only product I found I could find in the Sony booth that I could mention in my CES blog was a pair of headphones. This year, the product that I spotted that I thought would be interesting to Stereophile readers was "a pair of headphones!"