CES 2013

The 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show begins Tuesday morning. I'm flying out tomorrow morning and will begin tweeting @analogplanet and blogging on this site as soon as there's stuff to report. Honestly, I still haven't posted everything worth noting from RMAF back in October and I fully intend to get those posts online here too but first, CES 2013!

I first attended CES in 1978 when I was living in Los Angeles and working for Walt Disney. There's a line in TRON spoken by the villain SARK that resulted from that CES visit with TRON's director Steven Lisberger. SARK says "If you've seen one consumer electronics show, you've seen them all."

I can tell you that's definitely not true! In the early days, the high performance audio exhibits were in the cheesy "bungalows" of the Sahara Hotel and at The Jockey Club. Some exhibitors showed "off-site" at The Golden Nugget (Audio Research, Magnepan, Theta and some others).

Between 1978 and 1986 my CES visits were as a "civilian" and with very little money to spend on audio I was basically a "drooler-observer." I would buy some Kimber 8TC cable and some Teflon dielectric Tiffany RCA plugs, solder them up and wonder at the obvious improvement over the stock junk that came with the modestly priced electronics I could then afford.

I would see people like Doug Sax, Dr. Keith Johnson and some of the famous reviewers I read and my adrenalin flowed.

It was never my intention to end up as an audio reviewer, honestly! It just sort of happened. Now I go to CES and people treat me the way I reacted to seeing some of the people I read and felt connected to back then. It's amazing! But mostly I enjoy meeting young people who have found a way in to the "trade only" show. When I meet and see them, I see myself from a long time ago and it's an indescribably fantastic feeling.

This will be my first year blogging and tweeting from CES. I hope to "take you there" as best as I can!