So, you’re probably wondering, um, wasn’t CES back in January, and here it is five months later, so what’s with the delay with this article? It’s a reasonable question, but all I can do is offer a mea culpa. I had to deal with everything from health problems – I caught COVID again after NAMM 2024 – to a family member’s health, to trips to London, Sweden, Finland, and Estonia and back again to give a lecture on Andy Warhol and photography. The lecture’s conclusion? Warhol’s greatest impact was either providing free publicity for Polaroid, or more sinisterly, normalizing the theft of images from photographers and ripping them off, a subject that made it all the way to the Supreme Court last year with photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s lawsuit against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The result of that case is something that provides fresh new copyright protection for photographers and other creatives. I’m pretty sure that Warhol would have either hated the decision or just ignored it.
So, all of those things conspired against me finishing this article earlier. I’m also working on coverage of NAMM 2024, so expect that…soon. And Copper’s shift from bi-monthly to monthly means a missed deadline means at least a month delay. So, mea culpa, mea culpa. What can I say?
It was the Consumer Technology Association’s 100-year anniversary. Formerly the Consumer Electronics Association, they’re the organization that puts on CES. After a few years’ worth of an understandable huge drop in attendance as a result of COVID, the show once again felt like full steam ahead: we were back to complaining about lines again.
For most folks attending CES, one of the largest issues is where to stay. The combination of hidden “resort fees” and other charges, coupled with parking costs in casinos that used to have free parking, mean that for humble independent journalists, CES has suddenly become much more expensive, without anything additional to show for it. If you are backed by a large company, getting a hotel on the strip isn’t that big a deal, especially with the monorail to help get around. Journos, on the other hand, are all about poverty (I might be exaggerating a little, but who isn’t on a budget these days? Then again, I might not be exaggerating), so looking for the best deal becomes good sporting fun. Our CES 2024 team included myself, Nancy Burlan, and John Mulhern III, and between us we covered a lot of ground.
There was a lot to see at CES 2024, virtually as well as in the sprawling expanse of the show itself. Here, the author tries on the Ocutrx headset designed for folks living with macular degeneration. The field of view is specially tailored so that they can see the full image. Victoria McArtor looks on.
In the past many journalists stayed in the Motel 6 Las Vegas – Tropicana near the MGM Grand. It was cheap, especially if you rented for the entire week, around $250, has Wi-Fi with no additional fees, no pesky carpeting to hide bedbugs, and you can walk across the street to the monorail station at the MGM. But, they too started raising their prices during CES week, so that you still got a mediocre room with a plastic bathroom and a brick of a bed, but at the price of much nicer hotels. (To be fair, our penny-pinching editor has also stayed at the Trop many times and never encountered bedbugs.)
So, after talking to friends who lived in Las Vegas, we chose the Four Queens on Fremont Street. Yes, the other strip, full of noisy bands that played till 2 a.m., and drunk tourists, which sounds like the other strip, come to think of it. Our rooms were clean, a bit basic, but fine. After all, no one ever has time to use any hotel amenities during shows like CES, just the bed, bath, and sometimes free parking. Best yet, no hidden resort fees. Justin, who worked the front desk, upgraded us to a nicer room in the new tower, but most importantly, it’s away from Fremont, so it’s tons quieter…still noisy, but nothing like having a band blast away till past 2 a.m. a block away.
With free parking at the hotel, we drove to the CES venues each day, which fast became a problem. With the decision of some casinos to charge parking fees of over $20 a day, with no in-n-out privileges, having multiple appointments at different locales can really impact your wallet. We spent more on parking one day then the entire cost of our hotel room. In the past, casinos advertised free parking as a way to induce locals to gamble there. Not anymore, although some hotel credit cards with no annual fee include free parking, so we met a lot of folks who took advantage of this. If it’s Vegas, there’s always a hustle.
At Mac Edition Radio, my other gig, we cover a wide-range of tech-related products, and with the almost complete loss of higher-end home audio at CES, one has to search for such gear. One way to do this is to garner an invitation to pre-vetted media-only events, like Pepcom’s Digital Experience!, or ShowStoppers. Both are class-act affairs, with a large selection of products (along with open bars and buffets). So…they are understandably popular.
The ShowStoppers event had lots of interesting audio-related products including new earphones from Sennheiser and Anker, along with categories like AI snowblowers and lawnmowers. One interesting product was a unique headset for people suffering from macular degeneration, from Ocutrx. It produced images specially designed to be fully viewable even for those who have that ailment.
Audio aside, if your interest is in electronics per se, it’s all there: electric vehicles, electric toothbrushes, electrical storage batteries, electronic telescopes, electric grills, electric air purifiers, electric red light healing devices, electric air fryers and pizza ovens, and countless other stuff, even digital meat thermometers. And some of the products have uses in audio as well as other areas, like the data storage solutions from Other World Computing. And to be fair, there were a number of companies like Audio-Technica and Sennheiser showing headphones in the environs of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Peter Baker of Audio-Technica shows of their line of photo cartridges, from entry-level moving-magnet to high-end moving-coil. The company is showing an increased interest in ultra-high-end audiophile products. And of course they have the playful and popular Sound Burger portable turntable.
CES Unveiled is the press event that kicks off the show, and hosts lots of booths, startup companies, and foreign representation. This year’s theme was “All On,” and as always they featured open bars with great libations (Glenlivet, anyone?), coupled with inconsistent food, which seems to be the event trademark. This might sound cranky, but with Unveiled starting at 5:00 p.m., food matters, and there were some hangry journalists about! Two audio-related booths stood out. Mirai Speaker is a small company from Japan that offers a unique high-quality soundbar aimed at improving dialog clarity, with a distinctive, curved front panel.
Nancy Burlan of Mac Edition Radio notes this year's CES Unveiled theme, "All On."
Most importantly, Premium Audio Company was there, with the effervescent PR wiz Roberta Lewis spreading the word. We wouldn’t expect you to recognize Premium Audio as a brand, but you will certainly know their expanded product line, which includes Klipsch, Onkyo, Pioneer Elite, Integra, Mirage, JAMO, Magnat, and others. After meeting with them, I know they will be fighting to keep these brands in mindshare. A new line of feature-rich audio receivers from Onkyo caught my eye, and I look forward to reviewing one of them soon.
Derek Everson of Premium Audio holds the Klipsch Flexus Core 100 soundbar over his head at their suite in the Virgin Hotel.
Rob Vieira, Ryan Hansen, Dave Gans, Roberta Lewis, and Brian Mitchell of eCoustics at the Premium Audio booth at CES Unveiled 2024. As you can see from their product lineup, home theater has a thriving future.
Harman has become the real heavyweight for audio at the show. They take over much of the first floor of the Virgin Hotel, formerly the Hard Rock, and have a huge, lavish space to showcase their products. Our favorites are always the Luxury Audio Group, with brands like Mark Levinson, JBL, and others. This year, they showcased Arcam, which is having a resurgence of late.
We also bumped into two friends, Rob Darling and Danny Dulai, the founders of Roon. Why were they there? Well, because Harman just purchased Roon. How Harman plans to integrate Roon into its product line will be interesting, and we expect it will impact everything from high-end to automotive audio. Rob and Danny are great guys, so it’s lovely to see them do well. Harman’s annual concert is the hottest ticket in town (especially since the big Monster and CNET events are no more), and this year featured Green Day, who were absolute pros and rocked the gig.
Jim Garrett was hand to expertly guide us through Harman’s offerings, which included the new JBL Spinner Bluetooth-enabled turntable ($399.95), new JBL Bluetooth speakers, and the Arcam Radia ST5 streaming music player at $799. The legendary Carol Campbell, was there with a huge welcoming smile. Campbell is the founder of Women in Consumer Technology organization, and has had a long impact on the audio industry.
Green Day rocked the annual Harman/JBL concert. Here lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong belts out “American Idiot.”
Tre Cool, the drummer from Green Day, took a moment away from the skins to thank the audience. His real name is, Frank Edwin Wright III, so Tre is a play on that.
Jim Garrett of Harman, showing off the new JBL Spinner turntable. Gotta love that bright orange platter!
We were fortunate to meet the legendary engineer Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg of Brandenburg Labs, who is one of the co-inventors of the MP3 format. We laughed about it, but he said that most of the time that an MP3 sounds bad, it’s not the fault of the MP3, it’s the fault of the person who encoded it. But he was really there to show us a new immersive audio augmented reality headphones system called Audio AR, which determined where you were in the room and changed what you heard in the music (via headphones). Turn your head toward the strings, and voila, more strings. It was very impressive and natural-feeling. They also demonstrated a 16-channel immersive audio loudspeaker system. Nancy tried on their bunny-eared headphones to hear the effect.
Nels Merten, engineer Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg, creator of the MP3 format, and Cristina Rodriguez Ferreiro of Brandenburg Labs.
In another room, we entered into an exhibit full of bright orange boxes, boom boxes, and earphones. The folks looked familiar, and we soon found out why: they had started the popular Swedish headphones brand, Urbanista. How do you follow that up? With an entirely company, Defunc, with new headphones and speakers, all sporting lovely Scandinavian design principles with a hipster flair. In fact, they had some of the nicest products we saw at the show, with smart designs, packaging, and product features. I think they’ll be a hit.
Daniel Roos of Swedish brand, Defunc, was all smiles, surrounded by their new lineup of Scandinavian-designed lifestyle audio.
In the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, there was a small booth with an increasingly large impact, namely Leiyin Audio of China. As noted in Copper’s CanJam NYC 2024 Part Two show report in Issue 206, Leiyin Audio is one of the major players in the burgeoning Chinese hi-fi manufacturing community, with brands like S.M.S.L, Topping, xDuoo, Gustard, Moondrop, TRUTHEAR, and others. We asked about the use of the term “Chi-Fi” and if they viewed it as derogatory, as some commentators have posited, and they said they saw nothing negative about using it. With all the equipment they had on display, what was the unit they were most excited about? Their new CD player, the S.M.S.L PL200 CD player/DAC with MQA decoding. Contrary to expectations, CDs aren’t dead – and sales are actually increasing.
Not so long ago, phonograph maker Victrola was strictly a budget brand with an appropriated classic name, but they’ve been upping the quality of their gear each year and even starting to garner awards. At the Venetian they showed an expanded lineup of turntables (including the $599 Sonos-compatible Stream Pearl), retro-looking portable record players, and Bluetooth speakers. Crosley had a large booth, with a few lovely-looking products that referenced classic Braun audio component design, although no one at the booth had any idea that Braun made audio equipment or what I was talking about. I didn’t get a chance to check out how they sounded.
The large Crosley booth in CES' Central Hall featured new, minimalist, Bauhaus-inspired designs, such as this Fugue record player.
One invitation that fell through the cracks was an invite to the Wynn hotel to listen to a million-dollar system featuring the very latest McIntosh electronics and Sonus Faber speakers. To celebrate their respective 75th and 40th anniversaries, they’d set up a room with new and updated products, including 75th anniversary editions of several McIntosh products, the new MC2.1KW 2000-watt mono power amplifier, and the $750,000/pair Sonus Faber Suprema 2.2 loudspeakers. Unfortunately, we discovered the invites in our inbox the day after CES ended. Drat! Next year!
The newly-constructed Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall was all about cars, trucks, tractors, and automotive technology. It’s a slightly surreal space, open and well-lit, and hosted everything from a limited-edition Mercedes to giant John Deere tractors you had to climb into. Everyone in the hall had either a bright blue CAT cap, or a John Deere green cap, as the companies happily gave away thousands of them. Other booths featured everything from tire-changing machines to…lots of automotive stereo speakers, amps and components, all from China, destined to become either OEM (original equipment manufacturer) parts, or private-labeled.
The Bluetooth consortium had a large room across from the LVCC’s Central Hall and showed off their new Bluetooth Auracast system, which allows devices like phones, laptops, and public devices to broadcast audio to nearby devices such as speakers, headphones, and hearing aids. The Bluetooth representatives I talked with feel this will have a huge impact on how we listen to audio, whether in a movie theater, a synagogue or mega-church, or just as two star-crossed lovers like Nancy and I, wandering down the boardwalk sharing the same phone with the same content. If I were in the business of providing headsets and receivers to facilities like museums, schools, churches and synagogues, I’d be concerned about Auracast replacing such devices. It also promises higher audio fidelity and lower battery usage among other things.
However, the promise of better sound can be dependent on many factors. I’ve been working on a review of the Auris bluMe Pro DAC and Bluetooth streaming device. Once again the promise of Bluetooth audio quality is tempered by the company you use to stream from. Let me explain. I discovered that my Android OnePlus 10T 5G phone sounded great using Qobuz on the bluMe Pro, but the same songs from Qobuz on my Apple M1 MacBook Pro sounded, well…not so great.
I wondered why, and it turned out that my phone was happily sending music via Sony’s LDAC codec, at its highest possible quality, while Apple had quietly abandoned the ability to use their free Bluetooth Explorer app, which allowed Mac users to force the system to use AptX codecs for better audio quality. As a result, Mac users on modern computers are stuck with Apple codecs with Bluetooth, which might play well with Apple’s own branded earphones and headphones, but just ignores devices like the bluMe Pro, despite the latter’s rich feature set for high-quality codec support. (This is a reason to hang on to older Mac computers with older OS versions, since Bluetooth Explorer still works on them. So, that old computer might be perfect for a media server.)
I didn’t see any 8-track gear at CES, but there were folks showing their re-imaginings of the classic Sony Walkman portable cassette player. Cassettes are back! (Not to be confused with the knock-offs, Sony offers a line of Walkman portable digital music players.)
CES is in theory a trade-only event. For many companies, the costs of renting a suite, providing room and board for staff, and paying union fees for setup and freight to a B2B audience is proving not to be worth the ROI. There used to be many floors of high-end audio companies at The Venetian, for example, which had dwindled to a few floors in the years before COVID, and this year to just a few rooms, so I don’t expect to see a large-scale return of higher-quality audio to CES any time soon, but who knows, it might happen.
CES is still a very convenient way to meet with a lot of customers, members of the media, and potential partners. And the last night I was at the show I was invited to a Founders and Friends party/meetup sponsored by MistyWest, a design firm based out of Vancouver, Canada. It was held at The Doyle, a cool venue in a sort of dark and random industrial area, perfect for a community of creatives. They listed the party as “the premier unofficial event” of CES. That’s the thing about CES; you never know where you’ll end up and why, and what you might discover.
We hope to see more audiophile products and events at next year’s CES, and will dutifully report back, and hopefully on a timelier basis!. Still, there was personal, automotive, and consumer audio throughout the show, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There just weren’t the number of lavish suites of yore, apart from Harman and McIntosh/Sonus Faber. And it’s been announced that the Las Vegas area will be hosting a new audiophile show, slated for just after CES ends in 2025, by the same folks who bring you T.H.E. Show (held in Costa Mesa, California each June). slated to run January 10 – 12th, 2025, and they are currently running a social media contest for folks to guess the venue. Here’s an exclusive tip, it’s not at a hotel. It looks like it’ll be a good time. So get your entries ready!
Here are more images from CES 2024.
Hard-bitten journalists Dave Hamilton and Pete Harmon, of Mac Geek Gab, during CES Unveiled 2024.
Cher Lin and Ian Twinn of Withings showed off the latest in home health monitoring devices: here they hold the Withings Beam-O, seemingly science-fiction from a starship, but now available for your home.
Joseph Cruz and Keye Chen of Meater showed off their latest designs for Bluetooth digital food thermometers. We’ve tested them and found they really improved our grilled food!
Many of Copper’s readers utilize storage solutions from Other World Computing. Here the gang is out in force at Pepcom Digital Experience! Jeff Fochtman, Larry O’Connor, Steve Labus, Matt Burkey, Caroline Shamon, and Ryan Hartley.
This solar-powered webcam birdhouse was one of the most popular devices at CES Unveiled 2024.
1More was out in force, with Timothy Hsu and team. In the past we have reviewed their earphones and found that they represented a unique blend of style, audiophile performance, and bargain pricing. They were even graced with a coveted Red Dot design award.
Phiaton earned high marks from the audiophile community for their pioneering Bluetooth earbuds, among the first that actually sounded good. Hyo Lee and Paul Thavornv were showing their BonoBuds, a lovely set of earphones.
David Glaubke and the always-glamorous Carol Campbell at the entrance to the Harman area at the Virgin Hotel.
If you use Roon, you can thank these two gents! Danny Dulai and Rob Darling, founders of Roon, at the Harman space in the Virgin Hotel.
The large SK Wonderland area showcased AI and clean technologies from Korea's SK Group. Their exhibit was a theme park featuring this constantly-changing sphere, serving as the centerpiece of the most elaborate booth we saw at CES, complete with its own mini-railroad and different virtual reality environments.
Nancy Burlan wearing the specially-adapted headphones used by Brandenburg Labs to demonstrate their spatial audio system. I called them “bunny ears.”
The team behind Omsleep, whose sleep mask is feature-rich for a better night’s sleep. They participated in a “Shark Tank”-type event held at Eureka Park. Here are Andriele Dasilva, Kate Wu, Jacie Lin, and Kaitlyn Emery.
Here's June Lai, founder of case company Catalyst, and PR person Chris Herbert.
In the midst of the new West Hall, which featured automotive products, was this violinist in the Magna International booth. Magna was showing their electric car of the future, and provides a variety of high-tech solutions for the automotive industry. The sound of live music reminded us of why we're so interested in good audio reproduction.
Header image: Nancy Burlan of Mac Edition Radio by one of the welcoming signs for CES 2024. All images courtesy of Harris Fogel.
