The Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show is the great Mecca for our industry. It attracts the best and worst of manufacturers and distributors and is noted as being the place for both opportunity and betrayal in our business sector.

It is not uncommon for thirty year trading relationships beetween manufacturers and distributors to be suddenly broken at the CES, sometimes in a good way for the end user and sometimes through business treachery amongst previously trusted groups.

The distributor relationships have been particulalrly volatile in the post GFC E-Commerce world as the industry gradually comes round to a global pricing policy. Personally I think this is a very good thing for Australian consumers.

Some of the betrayals are however wittingly perpetrated on consumers by an industry desperate to sell product.

As a general rule new screen technologies are particularly prone to making exaggerated promises to potential end users...

So 4k TV has now replaced 3D as the technology to propagate ... what a pity there is no software and not even a format for delivering the non existent 4K movies to the customers, and a TV of this definition playing back 1920 x 1080 native HD content looks worse than a normal screen due to the need to process one pixel to four.

Like a shark if the manufacturers stop being in motion they cease respiration and die ... However like blue green algae they can also relentlessly and heedlessly reproduce first at the expense of other organisms in their market place and then die in their own exhausted anaerobic monoculture quagmire ... yes I mean Apple ... Competition really is good for the breed in consumer electronics.

In HiFi there are two technologies that I think were the show stars. One is definitely the advent of high quality streamer components a la PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC, any brand that's anyone in Hi Fi has to have a Music Streamer on range otherwise they are simply not in the game. How good those new Streamer models will look in two years time is a rather less optimistic question to ask.

Then there are the new Record Players. In my opinion the two beauties of the show are the McIntosh MT5 (that we don't sell) and the Rega RP8 (that we do sell). These are items of extraordinary engineering prowess and tangible physical beauty.

The BBC as ever has done a neat and candid synopsis of the event:

BBC at the CES Jan 14th 2013