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Clear Speakers, Segway Clone Top CES Coverage

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wish-I-coulda-gone dept.

jlouderb writes "Phew. We just finished five days of wall to wall coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Highlights include "invisible" speakers, a Segway clone for around $1,000, details on Intel's LCoS plans, a humanoid robot from Sony and more HDTV recorders, new home networking schemes and flat panel TVs than you can shake a stick at. If you weren't one of the 100,000 or so who made it to Vegas, check out what you missed at PCMag.com."

6 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Invisible Speakers by GameGod0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Coincidentally, there are no known photographs of these "invisible" speakers.

    1. Re:Invisible Speakers by r_glen · · Score: 5, Funny

      Here's a pretty decent picture of it.

  2. The other highlight by r_glen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Toshiba's .85 inch, 2-4GB hard drive

  3. Not a Segway by One+Louder · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Uh, that thing has *four* closely-spaced wheels - that makes it something that's going to fall over really easily. Stop suddenly and you're going to be singing soprano. There's no gyroscopic balancing going on.

    Not a big shock since the Segway's balancing system is patented.

  4. Attitude for success by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Best line, John Wang, president of Global Manufacture Group: "You bought it, you figure it out."

  5. Stax by Tikal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't think this is the first transparent speaker ever to come to market. I say this because I spent a fair portion of my childhood in front of a pair of Stax speakers -- the 6' high variety, two panels apiece. One of our audiophile friends had a pair of the 3' high speakers with only one panel each.

    You could indeed see through these; there was only a layer of something like a coarse cheesecloth in front of them, and a metal grill of sorts behind, protecting what I understood was a pair of sandwiched plastic layers that looked like celophane. Our cats would eye the whole arrangement from time to time and flex their claws. They learned to stay away from them eventually.

    This particular pair was a factory-rejected "showroom model", coming at a significant discount: the engineers had the bright idea of putting two LEDs on the bottom of the speakers to indicate whether you were overdriving the speakers. Green was loud but acceptable, and Red meant that you'd probably already committed one or more of the precious panels to the garbage. Unfortunately, their reviewers, who like to listen in dark rooms at high volume, found the presense of a bright green LED "distracting". The company purportedly removed it from subsequent models.

    The panels were apparently very low-yield -- something like only 11 pairs a year were manufactured, and it's seems pretty obvious from Stax's headphone-centric website that they're no longer making them. We did manage to get a replacement panel from them once, about 2 years after we purchased the speakers, but I'm pretty sure that won't happen again. The speakers had another problem recently with capacitors in their power supply leaking -- just recently we found a second batch when the second speaker's started going bad, but I don't believe they've been installed yet. A bit of a shame, really.

    As a side note, these speakers completely spoiled me -- nothing which I've had since sounds nearly as clear. With a good recording, you could close your eyes and completely lose yourself. These taught me to appreciate vinyl far more than I would have otherwise; with some listening and comparison, I could even understand why my father had gone with a tube amp rather than a solid state one...