CES 2015

It’s hard to get big bass sound from a small, portable player, but the Braven Balance, debuting at CES seems to make it work.

The coolest bits of technology can often come from someone looking at the same problem everyone else has but seeing a new and better way to fix it. Every been awakened at 3 AM to the dreadful CHIRP! from a smoke alarm? Ever heard the chirping and then had to wander around the house trying to figure out which detector it is that is making the infernal racket? What if you were away at work or on vacation and your house caught fire…wouldn’t you like to know about it before you came home to find the smoldering ruins of Pompeii where your home theater used to be? These are all problems solved in a brilliantly simple manner by Roost.

In November 1969, West Germany launched the Azur, the country’s first scientific satellite, into space. At CES Cambridge Audio launched the Azur 851N, the company’s flagship upsampling network music player that takes any incoming audio signals up into the high-resolution stratosphere.

On my walk from the Westgate hotel to the convention center I passed through the North Hall and ran into...a car show! Well not exactly, though most major car makers had room on the show floor. The emphasis was on car electronics and electronic car accessories.

TCL is one of the Chinese HDTV makers vying for attention at CES. While still little known in this country, the company claims to have produced 30 million HDTVs this year, the bulk of them going, so far, to markets other than the U.S. (most, of course, were sold in China). The company has 75,000 employees, with 23 R&D facilities, 21 manufacturing bases, and markets in 80 countries. It’s also building a new panel factory (it also sells panels to other manufacturers, some of them outside of China, for use in their sets). That factory will be 70% devoted to making TFT LCD panels and, interestingly, 30% to OLED.

Ultra HDTV will soon be divided into two tiers: lame, regular old UHD, and awesome, premium-grade UHD. How will you know which grade to get when you fill up at the pump—I mean, visit an electronics store?