Tech2

"It's great, I never have to pay for music again!" Such was the exclamation from someone I know in regards to Spotify.

I was baffled at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it annoyed me. Because my acquaintance isn't alone in this thought. It's prevalent among many, and it extends beyond music.

What they're really saying is: "I want you to entertain me, but screw you for trying to make a living at it."

What the what?

The CEDIA Expo focuses on home theater sound, home automation, high-end video projection, and all sorts of toys for rich guys’ mansions. So I’m surprised to say that the first report I’m filing from the Expo is about headphones — a product that few custom installers even sell.

To me, the most exciting and revolutionary home theater product at the CEDIA Expo wasn't a new speaker or projector or HDMI-over-CAT5 solution.

Maybe back in the 1920s, when Sound + Vision was called Superheterodyne Journal, we might have reviewed some giant tube amplifier that put out 2 watts at full blast. But other than perhaps some forgotten device from audio's days of yore, this storied publication has never tested an amplifier so small, so weak, so limited in utility as the Qinpu Q-2.

I don't understand some people. Ok, a lot of people. Internet people, mostly. The type of people with the need to proselytize their views about meaningless crap.

You know, like what I do. Only, not paid.

These malcontents have a passion for posting vitriol wherever their sensibilities about good and bad companies/products/technologies are impugned.

To which I say, WTF?

I'd expected a kind of This Is Your Life thing, where partygoers would be "treated" to a recitation of five decades of milestones. But the 50th anniversary party for speaker manufacturer KEF at the British Consulate in Manhattan was anything but a long look backward.

Somehow when I was walking around last month’s CEDIA Expo, I completely missed what must surely be the biggest, baddest, most expensive in-wall speaker ever created.