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CES and Vinyl

Every replay medium has a limited life span, and the marketplace can be downright brutal in the rapidity with which it replaces dated technology. Nonetheless, I doubt anyone as little as a year ago could have anticipated how quickly the new analog LP medium would lay waste to the antiquated digital-based silver disk.

Anyone who questions the speed at which analog vinyl is replacing digital need only peruse the fine pictorial reports of this years CES which are posted on the General Asylum. Innovation is the mark of any newly emerging technology and the innovation evident in this year’s crop of turntables is impossible for even the most die-hard digital Neanderthal to miss. Ironic isn’t it that digital cameras were used this year primarily to illustrate the emerging dominance of analog.

Oh yes, there were plenty of the stogy, mundane black-box CD and SACD players scattered throughout the rooms. But in the main they served primarily to fill up a lower shelf of one of the countless equipment racks crowned with one of the exciting and innovative new turntable offerings. Many of these marvelous new turntables were no doubt rushed to market by forward-looking manufacturers attempting to stay ahead of this groundswell of change that is engulfing the home entertainment market.

Hardware was not the only place this dramatic development was evident. Those tired, paunchy middle-aged men robotically picking through the CD bins in their vain attempt to find some recording of merit were pathetic in comparison to the fresh, young, energetic faces that infused electric excitement into each of the many booths which were offering a virtual cornucopia of classic and new recordings which are now flooding the market on pristine 180 gram vinyl records. Again, there was not only pathos, but true irony, in the fact that these middle-aged automatons who were chained to the CD bins because that is all they have known their entire adult lives were relegated to squinting and squirming to make out the small print on the puny jewel box covers, while those young studs whose eyes were decades away from failing them breezed through the endless bins of large, vibrant album covers.

The mass market always lags behind the high end. But I dare say it takes little foresight to predict that at next year’s CES, the turntables will have moved far beyond the rooms of the Alexis Park and St. Tropez hotels to permeate every last corner of the vast Las Vegas Convention Center.


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Topic - CES and Vinyl - Phil Tower 19:26:48 01/12/04 (22)


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