Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Heading to CEDIA tomorrow

It's almost 3:30 and the beer carts are making their way to various vendor booths. Too bad I don't drink booze. LOL. 2 more audio and 2 more video demos to go.

Oh, and I saw a long time "friend" of Axiom here. I will saw who later tonight.

Keep going! Cant wait for pics.

Just 33 pictures and 1 video to share. They are uploading on the slow hotel internet while I grab a bite for dinner next door.

CEDIA REPORT POST #1

OK. Not sure how many pictures I can put into one post, but I will try to make this more "picture heavy" than words since some people don't like to read. However, you know me. I like to tell a story.

So I arrived onsite nice and early. I'd say 30 minutes before the showroom floor opened (it opened at 9am), however I quickly realized that I must have come in the "back doors" of the convention center, as I had to walk, and walk, and walk just to start to see people gathering. That's fine, I had plenty of time.

Then I get to the automated badge creator stations, and wow are the line long. The process for getting a badge was easy. Enter your first name, last name, and zip code. If would search for you, and bring up any matches. You just clicked on your found name and bam, it would send your badge to the printer right there. The problem was that there were two computers to each badge printer and the printers weren't super fast, so that is what was taking the time.

I still got my badge, and made it over to the main showroom floor entrance with about a minute to spare.

So they let us in, and zoom.... I am heading to the back of the showroom to try to hit up a few demos right off the bat. Places like Golden Ear, Paradigm, Dolby, Auro 3D, etc were all in the back reached of the place.

I get there, and I see these tiny little listening rooms... OK, they aren't THAT small on the outside, but once you step inside, there is room for about 6-8 people is all. This is Auro on the left, and Dolby on the right. Keep in mind that Dolby had a really nice booth last year as they announced Atmos. I ended up skipping these as most of them were still getting set up for the day.


While looking around, I spotted some very interesting speakers. Here is an example:


I then got stopped by a booth offering "free massages." Well, I was sucked in and pretty soon I was sitting there for 30 minutes getting an electronic massage where they connect these little electrode pads and shock your muscles. I knew that it was a matter of time before they wanted me to buy one. Price started at $250, but before I left, they had it down to $120. I still passed as I had some walking to do:




Here is their layout that they used for Atmos, DTS:X, and Auro3D. They had 3 speakers behind the screen, two on each of the sides for surrounds, two on the back wall, 4 overheads in the "corners" above the listening area that were angled in for Atmos and DTS:X (and Auro3D, although not in Auro's recommended location), and a "Voice Of God" speaker in the middle. The two towering sets of woofers in the front corners basically produce all lower (and low) frequencies for the room. There are no "woofers" in their other speakers. This was AMAZING sounding again this year. Should be for the dealer price of $185,000 for the speakers and processor/amps. MSRP is considerably higher.

Steinway Lyngdorf Speaker Setup Video

EDIT: Ugh. Video won't embed into the post, and some pictures are coming up sideways after being posted.

More information coming either later tonight or tomorrow. For now, I've got some other work to do before heading home tomorrow.

CEDIA REPORT POST #2

Before moving on, I should mention some of the demos material I heard.
Atmos:
Mad Max: Fury Road - opening
Gravity - mission abort
Star Wars Battlefront - upcoming PC game release

Auro3D:
Turbo - sucked into the supercharger

DTS:X:
Divergent - where she is in the tank filling with water

Dolby Atmos and DTS:X were both in a 9.2.4 setup (although, as mentioned above, they don't use "subwoofers" but large "woofer arrays"... Whatever.
Auro 3D was in an 11.1 configuration.

The 2 side surrounds on each side were tied to the same "channel" output digitally so that they filled more seats with the same information. Oddly enough, the immersive audio processing handled it just fine.

Ok, moving on.

After that awesome goodness, I walked past the Pioneer booth. I was more curious about their receiver offerings since I haven't used Pioneer Elite products since V3 of my theater. Nothing really big, but they did have this:

Bob Marley was "Jammin'" on the old vinyl. Sorry, no cassette players could be found, so this was just one of a few analog audio devices I could find.


I also listened to their Atmos demo. they were using "Atmos Enabled" upfiring speakers. After the Steinway Lyngdorf, I didn't expect much. I was really disappointed in the sound. Then they gave the price tag. Their Pioneer setup was $2000 total MSRP (receiver, speakers, and sub), and their Pioneer Elite setup was $5000 total MSRP. A far cry from the almost $325,000 MSRP Steinway Lyngdorf setup, so there was no way that it should sound that good. For the price, it wasn't bad. Just felt like going from an amazing movie experience to watching something and hearing it through a decent HTIB.

The Pioneer Atmos demo material was:
Mad Max: Fury Road - opening
Star Wars Battlefront - upcoming PC game release
747 Take Off - audio only

I then ducked into a Triad speaker demo. I don't have any pictures, but that is because most of their stuff was somewhat hidden. They did use upfiring speakers as well for their demo, and it did sound a lot better than the Pioneer setup. It had an $11,000 price tag which I believe was just for the speakers. Somehow I missed the audio processing and amplification. I want to say it was Marantz. Triad's deal is that they have a 4 day turn around on speaker orders and all speakers are build to order... Sounds familiar. They really bragged about being able to work with installers for any architectural situation. Heck, they said that this past summer, one of their resellers needed a speaker back to be cut out so that it could fit almost flush against a pipe that was discovered in a ceiling for an Atmos upgrade installation. They get the details of how much needed to be cut, etc, and built the needed speaker and had their engineers work on the crossovers and box design so that it "perfectly timbre matched the other speakers." I must have heard that 5 times in 2 minutes about how they will "perfectly timbre match" for all of their speakers in all situations. OK, maybe. I don't know.

The Triad demo was Atmos only. They played the following on their 7.4.4 system:
Star Wars Battlefront - upcoming PC game release
Amaze - (2014 Atmos demo material)
Prometheus - where they were using the laser scanning/mapping probes. This was actually a DTS 7.1 track that was "upmixed" into Atmos and sounded quite good.

CEDIA REPORT POST #3
Alright, after these demos, I went back to the show floor as these demos (and others) were actually held in the adjacent hotel.
Crestron had a huge booth, but honestly I didn't do much more than walk by.




Good ol' Kaleidescape was there. They always had a bunch of people watching their in-home video "streaming" system demo since it can now do 4K.


Then I took a stroll by the James Loudspeaker booth. they had some strange, and boring, looking speakers, but boy were they huge.



For whatever reason, I don't have any notes from the James demo. I remember it being loud and low. As in so much low frequency air movement that you could feel your shirt and hair moving, even if just a little bit. I remember it being a solid demo, and they had their own demo mix instead of the pre-packaged Atmos, Auro3D, or DTS:X demo discs. Everything ended up being in Atmos. Some clips included Saving Private Ryan where they start to take the beach, Tron Legacy light cycle race, and a few more.

CEDIA REPORT POST #4

Back around the show floor, I saw a couple of booths with TVs behind mirrors. Someday I think that my wife would like this in our bathroom instead of the TV on the wall. No, I am not the guy in the middle of the mirror.



Klipsch had a cool looking booth, but not much for listening too.


I liked this saying:
"Pissing off the neighbors since 1946."


While waiting for a JBL Synthesis demo, I spotted these beasts:


I then ducked out of line when they stated that there was a technical difficulty and found the actual Triad booth. Here are samples of their 21" subwoofers. These are what they had in their demo room I mentioned earlier (4 of these in fact).


I hit up the Sonos booth to see what they had compared to AxiomAir since almost everyone compared any other similar product at the show to Sonos as being the "standard." Their best product is quite a bit smaller than the AxiomAir, but has a lot of similar connectivity options. They are using 6 smaller speakers (3 tweeters, and 3 "mid-range" but dang, those would be small mid-range speakers). I didn't hear the product as a stand alone as they had all of their products playing the exact same thing, so you couldn't tell how one of the products did by itself.


Then over to KEF. No demo, just big speakers like usual.

CEDIA REPORT POST #5
Still no JBL demo running, so I wait (for the 1st of 4 times) for an Integra demo. While waiting, one of the Integra reps was being filmed for a daily CEDIA show. They were filming people all over the place, so I just grabbed a shot. I know, it too is a bit blurry. It was getting warm in the place, and my hands were getting a bit "moist" and I kept forgetting to wipe the camera lens on my phone. Oh, after waiting a while, I find out that the 1 guy that runs the demo is in a meeting. OK. I will come back. I did, and the guy still wasn't back. This was like an hour later. I came back again, and missed getting into the demo by 2 minutes. OK, at least they are doing them and the one rep tells me that the demos are at the top and bottom of each hour (every 30 minutes). I come back, this time 10 minutes early. I stand and wait and wait. The bottom of the hour comes (3:30) and nothing. No door opens, nothing. I wait until 3:31 and go ask the same lady. Well, somehow, in that 25 seconds, the guy opened the door, and let in 2 other people that were waiting, closed it, and locked it. Are you kidding me?! I gave them a piece of my mind. No wonder there was no line for their demo. You never knew if you were standing in the right spot, when it was going to happen, etc).


Heos was a part of a massive D&M (Denon and Marantz) area, and this looked cool in person.


There were several interactive booths. Here is one, but nobody was singing.


I then found the huge 120" Vizio TV. This won a CEDIA new product award. It was quite impressive.

CEDIA REPORT POST #6
OK. So I head back over to the D&M area for a demo.



Yup, more DTS:X

I will make a separate post about DTS:X later, but I scored some nice swag. Too bad I don't have an Atmos or DTS:X system to listen to these on.


The Denon & Marantz demo was actually quite good. Not only sound wise, but the person giving the demo was very knowledgeable on DTS:X, as well as Atmos of course. He shared a LOT of DTS:X information since he knew that people wanted to know about it. Again, I will share that later.

Their setup was using (like everyone else) the Engineering Code (pre-beta) for DTS:X

They too played some DTS:X clips
Divergent and Locked up
and some Atmos clips that I didn't write down.

One really cool DTS:X clip that they played was called Cymatics by Nigel Stanford.

Here is a non-DTS:X version of it:
Cymantics Demo

After that great and informative demo, I walked around and came across these guys:



Anything look familiar???