Sean Martin and Janice Manusco represented RR at T.H.E. Show, an audio show that takes place concurrent with the CES. While CES covers every home entertainment gadget under the sun including audio, T.H.E. Show focuses solely on high quality audio.
This year, T.H.E. Show, moved into a new location, The Flamingo Hotel, just down the strip from the CES high-end audio exhibits in the Venetian.
They set-up our booth on Wednesday in a large ballroom along with other ‘software’ companies. That’s what music is called in the audio world.
In addition to selling RR products, we also offered the hi-rez discs from Chesky Recordings and MA Recordings.
Many attendees were interested in hi-resolution music either downloads or from disc. As with any new platform, and especially one that straddles audio and computers, there’s a wide range of opinions about it and lots of education to do. Most of the people Sean and Janice talked to realize that computer-based audio doesn’t mean putting a CD in your computer. They referred a great many to Chris Connaker’s site www.computeraudiophile.com for more input and to www.HDtracks.com for downloads.
Over in the Venetian, several high-profile companies played RR’s HRx discs in their demonstrations. Either natively from disc like PS Audio’s Perfect Wave or the new Embla player from the Bladelius Design Group of Sweden, or as Magico, TAD, MSB and others did, via music servers.
We were pleased to see several of our international trading partners including Jan Sieveking/Germany, Tonci Dumicic/Croatia, Nabil Akhrass/Canada and Henry Ahn/Korea. And audio journalists, including Harry Pearson, founder of The Absolute Sound, Ken Kessler from hi-fi news, Phil Gold of Enjoy the Music.com and his brother Alvin from Hifi Choice and Michael Fremer, analogue maven from Stereophile.
Speaking of analogue, we heard over and over that there’s very strong, one might even say pent-up, demand for the long-awaited reentry of RR into the LP field. We’ve been saying ‘soon’ for a long time! KOJ and Tam insist on getting it right, as it should be!
All in all, the 2010 show was a positive experience.