Chuck asked me to take notes and post my observations when I returned from CES. Recognizing that most on this board would view my comments as those of a looney yeasayer and of no interest or value, I decided to post my overall comments on Audio Asylum at:

http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/gen...es/307880.html

Also, photographic proof of my attendance can be found at:

http://img.audioasylum.com/cgi/view....00&w=448&h=479

As for cables, I spent virtually no time investigating them. I’m quite satisfied with the cables in my system and was much more interested in other items.

But, I will offer this observation. After-market cables are bigger than ever in high end audio. I don’t recall seeing a single room at the Alexis Park or the St. Tropez that wasn’t using after-market cables, including power cords (and many also using line conditioners). The naysayers can cite Dunlavey until the cows come home, but he is almost a minority of one at this point in high end audio – at least from what I saw at CES (keep in mind I wasn’t paying attention to cables, so there may have been rooms I visited that weren’t using special cables).

CES is a very expensive, once-a-year opportunity for manufacturers to line up new dealers and I assume that each vendor does everything he can afford to do in order to maximize the performance of his particular system. There are hundreds of rooms to visit and the crowds are daunting. Visitors seem to walk into a room and if within the first minute or so they don’t like what they are hearing they turn around and walk out. The vast majority of high end vendors (if not virtually all) seem to believe that they can enhance their systems through the use of the expensive cables (of course, some equipment and speaker vendors share rooms with cable companies, in which case they don’t actually own the cables being used, but many paid for and own their own expensive cables). This doesn’t prove anything. But certainly the overwhelming majority of high end manufacturers seem convinced that cables do make a difference and are important. At least, that was my observation.

The thing that really surprised me was the major presence of cable companies at the home theater displays at the main convention center. I saw only a small fraction of the main home entertainment displays (the crowds were overwhelming, and this CES brought Las Vegas’ taxis and its transportation system to its knees), but Monster, Tara Labs, AudioQuest, Transparent (used in the Foroudja demonstration) and many others had major displays at the main convention center.

The displays at the convention center are huge, expensive mainline-oriented layouts, and it is clear that after-market cables are very much a part of that market and not just limited to high-end 2-channel audiophiles.

The naysayers may have the upper hand when it comes to demands for “proof”, but from what I can tell they are not even a blip on the radar screen in the high-end audio and home theater marketplaces.