Surveying the soundscape.

Thiel Spiel: My visit to Las Vegas for this year's Consumer Electronics Show started off with an anxious hour at McCarran Airport. The hotel van was very slow to arrive and I feared I'd miss the first event on my schedule--Jim Thiel's introduction of his Thiel Audio's new CS3.7 speaker system.

My concern was heightened by the fact that the Thiel presentation was taking place at the Sands Expo Center. The Sands center was a new venue for the CES this year and both its location and layout were unfamiliar. When I finally got to my hotel, I found that the Sands center was just a couple of blocks away and a short stroll would get me there in good order.

When I arrived, I found that the unfamiliarity of the layout at the Sands center extended to the folks at the CES info booth. The show office hadn't provided them with accurate location information for the conference rooms that, while directly connected to the Sands center, actually were in a section of the Venetian hotel.

I got to the room just a couple of minutes after the presentation started. It appeared to be filled to capacity or maybe a little beyond. I figured I'd have to listen at the doorway, but Thiel's publicity mignons had sharp eyes for available space and found me some standing room inside.

It turned out that I needn't have worried or hurried. The bulk of the Thiel spiel involved discussions of voice coil and gap length, enclosure and diaphragm stiffness, phase coherence, crossover componentry, and other topics that speaker builders trot out at every opportunity.

Maybe Mr. Thiel figured that such a large gathering must necessarily include a significant proportion of utter newbies who had never heard all that before. Certainly each company puts its own spin on the familiar litany but it would have been kinder to deliver the spin only and let the printed material fill in the blanks for the uninitiated.

What no one in the room heard was the speaker system itself. That wasn't a surprise. We'd all been informed in the invitation that only a non-working model would be on hand. I presume that the undeniably unsavory acoustic environment of cavernous setting was a major factor in conducting a demo-less presentation. On the other hand, I recall that one of the most impressive speaker demos I ever heard took place in a much larger and acoustically less supportive room. Perhaps a bit more confidence in the new product wouldn't have been an error on Thiel's part.

In any case, there was a single silent CS3.7 on the stage, garbed in a classic-appearing Japanese kimono. At one point in his speech, Mr. Thiel reached out and whisked the garment away with a flourish, revealing the speaker in unadorned glory. The room erupted in resounding applause. I have no idea why. We knew that the speaker was under there. Had it suddenly disappeared--David Copperfield style--when the kimono came off, that would have been cause for marveling.

In addition to what it may sound like, there's one other thing no one found out about the CS3.7 at the Thiel event: what it is going to cost. Probably by the time this account gets to you, both will be public knowledge.

My next scheduled conference was with DTS. That one would take place in the North Hall of the main CES site at the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was a quick trip to the Convention Center from the Sands center so I had time enough to follow the crowds to Panasonic's press conference.

Big News: Panasonic's big--literally big--story was its 104 inch plasma screen TV. You may have seen the coverage on TV, online, and in print media. A couple of booths away, poor Samsung came up an inch short and got little press attention for its 103 inch screen.

Now I don't really care who holds the record for the largest flat-panel TV screen, but apparently a lot of people do in spite of what seems to me the obvious inaccuracy of screen measurements. Get out a tape measure and check the diagonals of the various TVs and monitors in your house. Your observed screen measurements won't always match precisely what's specified.

I didn't measure the visible diagonals of the Panasonic and Samsung behemoths, but I'll bet there's not an inch of difference between them. And I wouldn't care to guess which brand actually came up with the higher number.

Living in a Box: Panasonic and Samsung went eyeball-to-eyeball another matter, too. Both proudly announced breakthrough cooperation agreements with Comcast, the cable TV company. They both will be supply Comcast hundreds of thousands of digital cable decoder boxes that support various kinds of wired and wireless connectivity and supposedly will simplify and enhance subscribers' experiences.

These are still being called set top boxes, by the way, in spite of the fact that practically none of the TV sets being displayed at the CES have tops. The whole TV set top box idea reeks of 1952 anyway. That was the year that UHF channels were made available. The only way to receive them at first was with, you guessed it, a set top box. It took ten years and an act of Congress to force TV makers to include both UHF and VHF tuners in all sets coming off their lines.

The next wave of set top boxes arrived with the popularity of cable TV and its high band channels that could not be tuned by off the shelf TV sets. In this case, the marketplace rather than federal legislation quickly filled the gap with cable-ready TVs and VCRs that made the boxes unnecessary except for premium subscription and pay-per-view channels.

Set top boxes should be a total embarrassment to the industry and not something touted with pride. At the Panasonic presentation three guys got up on the stage to pose for photos with the prototype set-top-box. Each had a big happy grin on his face. The one in the center held the box while the other two each placed an adoring hand on it.

If TV manufacturers could make cable-ready sets 30 years ago, they should be able to make everything-ready sets today. We should be able to buy TVs that can handle analog and digital feeds from any cable provider, satellite TV feeds of any description from any provider, and terrestrial DTV from any broadcaster without needing any additional hardware.

Such sets might use card slots to help control access to various providers, but the better approach would be to build in addressable circuitry that would automatically validate accounts and allow the user to operate the set directly, taking scant notice of anything but the programming being selected and certainly without hooking up anything to the set beyond the signal feed from cable or antenna.

The Panasonic presentation included a quick appearance by Picabo Street and some talk about Panasonic's involvement with the winter Olympics and wrapped up with a very well-produced song and dance show that neatly integrated live performers with a wall of plasma displays. As the finale faded, I eased out the back and headed for DTS.

Chopped and Channeled: I arrived just on time by the clock, but the DTS folks weren't quite ready to go. At least I had a chair to sit in and pleasant servers provided sips of champagne. During the wait I admired the industrial strength look of the PMC speakers that surrounded us. Their look promised a program full of impact, as befits a company whose middle name is "Theater."

The first task assigned to the speakers was to offer an invitation to "Journey into entertainment as you've never seen or heard before" over and over and over again, first from this direction then that direction then another direction with plenty of kitschy synthesized sound effects bouncing about in '70s style.

The idea was to get our aural appetites whetted for the first public demonstration of DTS-HD Master Audio. It's a lossless 7.1 channel audio format that can share high capacity Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD space with high definition video.

Musicians Ice-T, Martyn Ware, Omar Hakim, and music producer Nathanial Kunkel held forth from the dais on the benefits that DTS-HD will offer artists, engineers, and producers. They all, of course, felt that the multiplicity of high definition audio channels would allow them much more creative freedom than the currently traditional two channels of stereo recording.

I've heard plenty of recordings where the artists, engineers, and producers can't get themselves sufficiently organized to handle two channels. I fear that having an additional 5.1 channels (5 full range and one for effects) available will in many cases allow marginally creative hacks to do even more musical harm than they can currently inflict.

The demos at the DTS conference were diverse, intriguing, mostly well-conceived, some with odd content, but overall more like a good first try rather than totally convincing.

It turned out that the most telling observation was made early on in the proceedings by DTS CEO Jon Kirchner. He said that we are "accelerating into the high definition era," absolutely nailing the unofficial theme of the entire CES. To paraphrase an old Dinah Washington hit: "HD is the thing this year."

And the HD craze isn't going to be limited to audio and video, not even to electronics. I'm expecting to see everything from house paint to haircuts being marketed as High Definition before the craze subsides.

i-i-i!: What is it about the iPod that has made it a phenomenon rather than a product, a cultural icon rather than a portable music player? Is it the iTunes association? Is it Apple's legendary skill in designing a user interface? Is it Apple's legendary skill in promotion? Maybe it's the white wire.

Whatever the explanation, I couldn't turn a corner at the last CES without running into an iPod-related offering.

The most prevalent were products to let an iPod owner ditch the earphones and play his or her stored music out loud. All you have to do, in most cases, is set your iPod on a docking connector. You may have to do a one-time setup consisting of clicking into place an adaptor for your particular iPod model.

You don't really need an iPod-specific mini-system, of course. Any of the amp-speaker setups typically used with computers or gaming systems will play iPod audio by tapping into the earphone jack. But that definitely downgrades the coolness factor in the overall iPod experience.

(By the way, if you have one of the newer 30 Gb or 60 Gb Video iPods and try to use an off-the-shelf red, white, and yellow plug video cable, you'll find that Apple has fiddled around with the plug assignments. The red plug supplies video, the white plug carries the right channel audio, and the yellow plug has left audio. At least this is the word from the people at www.macdevcenter.com.)

Audio zealots will probably feel most comfortable with one of the Klipsch i-products. Klipsch was touting the new iGroove at the show. It's a sleek one-piece iPod playback station. It's compact, sounds good, looks good, and costs about $280. For about $400, you might prefer the four-piece Klipsch iFi. It's which is not sleek and not compact, but in terms of sound output and quality, it kicks the iGroove's sleek butt.

The Klipsch iFi (not to be confused in any way with Apple's new iPod Hi-Fi) weds a three-piece system (two Klipsch RSX-3 satellites and an 8-inch subwoofer with 200 watt amp) to an iPod dock. Need I say more? Actually, I do. As with most iPod-specific playback systems, the iFi and iGroove each come with a remote that unifies control of the iPod and the amp/speaker system.

There are even a few tube-based iPod docking systems out there. As with most current tube products, they come in two flavors. There are the small, cute, retro looking ones and the large, opulent, high-tech looking ones. In the case of these systems, I'm partial to the small cute ones since they have a natural aura of iPod about them.

The one at the Global American Technologies CES booth really caught my eye. I wasn't able to audition it because the GAT folks had left their iPod in the hotel, but it sure looked right.

The electronics are on two chassis, chrome with high gloss black end caps. One has three tubes and a hefty transformer on top. The other has a docking connector for an iPod. Both have a chrome bar that goes up and over. On the dock, it serves as a rest and support for the iPod. On the amp, it will help keep unwary fingers from accidentally brushing a hot tube.

The speakers are standard-looking (dull-looking, really) oak boxes. Each houses a 4-inch woofer and a 1-inch dome tweeter. A cosmetic change in the speakers is needed and might be forthcoming.

The system carries a two part model designation: MP-5 + MP-5D. The first part refers to the amp and speakers, the second part to the docking unit for the iPod. Yes, there's a remote, too. And there's a second input on the amplifier in case you care to add a tuner, CD player, or other line-level source.

When it hits retail shelves, the MP-5 system will cost under $500, but it won't sport either the GAT or the closely related ThunderTech brand. It probably will have a different model number, too. GAT is negotiating retail distribution and branding rights with an undisclosed major audio company. When I find out more, I'll pass the word.

If you already have an available amp and speakers (and don't care simply to use the earphone jack solution), you can get away with something like Xitel's HiFi-Link for iPod. It's a very compact docking station with RCA out jacks that will feed iPod audio into any standard stereo system inputs. It includes a remote, of course, and works with any iPod (sometimes requiring the dock adapter inserts that Apple includes with its newer models). The general purpose HiFi-Link for iPod retails for about $80. You can get a version-specific HiFi-Link for iPod Nano for $10 less.

For about $250, the ATO iSee will turn an iPod into a video recorder and player. The iSee works with most standard, mini, nano, and video iPods. Some require an adapter, which is sold separately. Check the website (www.isee-ato.com) for compatibility details.

The iPod slips into a space on the back of the iSee. On the front is a 3.6 inch color video screen. You use a master dock accessory (included) to make connections to the external world. With the connections in place, the iSee turns the iPod into a mass storage device for a great variety of video (and audio) sources. You can also hook up the iSee to your TV and record or play back broadcast shows.

Getting Mugged in Vegas: That's some of the good stuff. Quite a few iPod accessories are merely opportunistic rubbish. Take the Dlite Full Spectrum Docking Lamp. (You can add a Henny Youngman "please" at the end of the previous sentence if you care to.) This desk lamp has a pocket molded into the base into which you can drop an iPod, or the manufacturer says, a cell phone, PDA, or a portable satellite radio.

That list might as well include keys, spare change, pocket knife, granola bar, or deck of cards since that's all the dock does-hold items of a certain size. The brochure does point out that you can recharge an iPod or other electronic item "Using Your Own Charger" while it's sitting in the lamp base.

You could, of course, make the same claim for a coffee mug.--TK