CEDIA 2010

Here are a few final photos of the Georgia World Congress Center and the show floor, plus one more from the Georgia Aquarium. I really liked the architecture of Building B's foyer.

Former Spice Girl “Scary Spice”, Mel B, and current star of both “Mel B: It’s a Scary Life” and “Dance Your A** Off” is getting some Phase Technology, Induction Dynamics, and SoundTube speakers in her (no doubt, plush) home in California. I’m sure as part of a quid pro quo, Mel B is going to appear at the Phase Technology/Induction Dynamics/SoundTube (all part of the MSE Audio Group) booth on Friday, September 24th, in order to sign autographs and attract as much attention to the booth as possible. I was never a fan of the Spice Girls, nor do I watch any of Mel B’s current TV efforts – but I will go by the booth; not on Friday, though, because they’re having free beer on Thursday. (I’d have gone by regardless of the free booze since Phase Tech is one of my favorite all-around speaker companies.)

Pioneer showed three new 3D Blu-ray players, including this Elite BDP-43FD and an Elite BDP-41FD (the latter lacks the 43's extra mass damping). No prices or launch dates were announced.

Andrew Jones of TAD has been designing hugely underrated speakers for Pioneer for years. Until now his bleeding-edge designs have been high-priced. But the SP-BS41-LR hits a new low price point of $199/pair in hopes of moving units through big-box retailers. The curved cabinet is cooked and formed, in lieu of the more conventional cut and fold process. Center and surround models are available to form a 5.1 system that will go for under $1000. The slim tower at far right is the Series 9, whose drivers were designed specifically for the enclosure. A vertical tube feeding out the bottom sucks away standing waves.

Procella Audio introduced its speaker line to the US market at last year's CEDIA Expo, but they are only now starting to ship here. The P815 ($10,000 each), leftmost in the photo above, consists of two sealed cabinets—one for a 15-inch woofer and the other for a 8-inch midrange and 1-inch compression tweeter in a custom-designed waveguide—and each cabinet is powered with 700W of onboard class-D amplification. The passive P8 ($2600 each) and P6 ($1600 each)—hanging on the wall in this photo—both sport the same 1-inch compression driver with an 8-inch and 6.5-inch woofer, respectively.

A trio of powered subwoofers includes the P18 ($10,000) with dual 18-inch drivers and 700Wx2, P15 ($6000) with dual 15-inch drivers and 350Wx2, and P10 ($4000) with dual 10-inch drivers and 350Wx2.

Direct-to-consumer Emovita introduced a higher-end line aimed at distribution through CEDIA installers. The PMC-1 (shown here on top) is a 7.1-channel pre/pro with a fully-integrated Control4 HC200 controller built-in. The PMC-1 includes only HDMI switching with no legacy video inputs, so you’ll have to get a component-to-HDMI adapter to connect your Wii to it. The PMA-7350 (on the bottom) is a matching 7 x 350 watts amplifier. Shipping is expected to start in the first quarter of next year.

Projectiondesign's press conference concentrated on the Optix SuperWide 235 (around $39,000 with a standard lens), whose DLP imaging chip boasts a native resolution of 2560x1600, though this model uses only 1080 horizontal lines. This projector can display any aspect ratio from 1.33:1 to 2.40:1 at constant height without needing an anamorphic lens or zoom memories, which rob the image of brightness. For wide-screen Blu-rays, it scales the image vertically and horizontally using Sigma Designs VXP processing and two custom FPGA (field-programmable gate array) chips to fill the 2560x1080 pixel structure and maintain a 12-bit color depth per channel.

The demo was shown on a 13-foot-wide Da-Lite Affinity screen (1.1 gain) with a hand-built prototype with only one of two lamps in operation, so we were seeing a peak-level of about 7.5 foot-lamberts. Clips from Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Spider-Man 3 looked quite good, though I would not have chosen Paul Blart—what an awful movie!