January 06, 2006
I Wish I Was at CES in Vegas
I am hitting my head against the wall. Case gives us students an extra week before classes and I am sitting here in Indiana instead of enjoying the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. And boy, am I missing some awesome product announcements.
Every year CES introduces the newest "must have" gadgets for the upcoming year. This year is no exception. I was thrilled when I checked Alpine for their new products. Their new car head units are compatible with a cable that plugs directly into your iPod and allows you to control and play your iPod through your car stereo. To top it off, the new head units have Bluetooth support, XM and Serius support, and the top models even have support for decoding DVD-Audio. Did I mention it can play DVD's with MP3's on them? Yeah, that's just crazy. I almost fainted when I read about the next generation of Dolby Digital and DTS, both feature lossless encoding using 24 bits at 96kHz. Finally, I can buy music and not be bothered by the limitations of 16 bit sampling. Now, hopefully the manufacturers will get on the same page about a distribution medium (although it seems HD-DVD seems to have a horse's length lead on Blu-ray at the moment...).
Again, many companies seem to be pushing their home multimedia offerings. Everyone wants to put their PC *cough* *cough* I mean media center in our living rooms. Still, these products have yet to gain traction. Undercurrents of digital piracy are everywhere, which seems to be holding back this particular sector. We see all of these new products that let us take our multimedia anywhere, but more and more restrictions are placed on the media itself to prevent it from being distributed. Someone will eventually win this tug of war. I sure hope it is the consumers. If you can see it or hear it, you can record it. End of story.
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Comments
I wish I were there too.
I'm following www.engadget.com for minute-by-minute updates.
Get the latest version of KnoppMyth that was released yesterday. Very easy, works with my sub-par hardware including my ancient TV tuner and ATI "remote wonder" remote control! It rips DVDs to hard disk (in either good, excellent, or perfect! encoding). I am very pleased.