I now consider myself a veteran of CES. The good news is that I know exactly how to navigate the floor. The bad news is that it gets harder each show for me to be wowed by anything.
The iPhone has clearly infiltrated our culture. Its owners are rabidly loyal, and they’ll tell you that every other phone is inferior to theirs. Alas, the many people out there still devoted to BlackBerry can only look longingly at the iPhone, wishing for some of those cool features that Apple has become famous for.
When I was a teenager, I had these giant Koss headphones. You know the kind. They covered both ears with these giant cups. They sounded great. I remember listening to Blows Against the Empire, the 1970 album by Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship, with them. Music would bounce back and forth from the left channel to the right and back in glorious stereo.
I recently mentioned how much I really dig my network-attached storage (NAS) hard drive and how I like to keep all of my music, photos, and videos on it so I can feed the whole house with media via Apple TV or Roku. Since I have a huge investment of both time and personal memories stored on this drive, I really need to protect it properly — and that’s why I’ve recently moved to a RAID drive.
Figuring out how to watch TV while I’m out of my house has always been a challenge. I got a black-and-white Sony Watchman as a gift for Christmas in 1985 that worked pretty well for the time; I took it to the pool to watch Mets baseball and to my son’s basketball games to watch Jets football.
The days of getting in your car and driving to a video store to rent a movie are coming to an end. In addition to the new iTunes Movie Rentals, there are other ways of getting movies into your home without getting off your couch.
When I moved into my new house earlier this year, I had hopes of setting up some of my more antiquated gear. One of the pieces is a Technics turntable - state of the art, circa 1985. When people (er, guys) see it, they start waxing poetic about their vinyl LP collections and how, "one day," they're going to get another turntable.
I wasn't sure why the guys at S&V asked me to have a listen to Acoustic Research's AWD510 wireless 5.1-channel headphones ($350; audiovox.com). They looked big and clunky compared with many of today's much smaller 'phones and earbuds.