CES 2012

Roku showed a network media player that is simply a large dongle that connects directly to your TV set. Shrinking the already small Roku 2 design even more, the new device doesn’t reduce the content or experience.

The Roku dongle will connect to an HDMI port on your TV. It will not come with its own remote. Instead, once connected, you can use the TV remote to navigate the Roku’s home screen, channels and to control playback.

Photo by Barb Gonzalez
Freelance home-theater journalist Geoff Morrison and I spent a pleasant hour discussing 3D on a CES panel called "3DTV: From Theater to Living Room." Topics ranged from 3D technology in commercial cinemas and at home, the objections to 3D voiced by many, what we might see in the future, our own opinions about the subject, and answers to audience questions. A fun time was had by all!

The Atlantic Technology exhibit at the Venetian featured the first 5.0-channel demo of the smaller H-PAS speaker. We hope to atone for this awful picture of of it with a quasi-review in our print mag. What depraved impulse moved us to go gallivanting off to Vegas when this product was sitting in our bedroom? H-PAS uses a variety of construction techniques to produce deep, true bass without resorting to a sub. While this demo was less than ideal, we could still hear an ideally proportioned rhythm section with precisely pitched bass guitar tones and good impact from the drums. Closing our eyes actually made it sound better: Once we were freed from the tyranny of visually reinforced preconceptions, our ears told us this was the good stuff. Incidentally, the speaker will be sold in single units, so if you want five or seven of them, no sweat.

Not much has emerged from the Denmark-born Jamo speaker brand since its acquisition by the Klipsch Group, now itself acquired by Audiovox. But that's changing with a bevy of new Jamo products including the MS25 satellite speaker shown here. What a civilian might identify as a tweeter firing into a spoon is actually Jamo's implementation of OmniPolar technology acquired along with Mirage. This new design was reshaped by authentic Danish designers. There will be no new products labeled Mirage, bringing an end to the historic Canadian speaker brand. The product development guy who briefed us punctuated his presentation by saying "Mirage is a brand, OmniPolar is a technology"—a technology living on under another banner.

This is Mishka the talking dog saying "I love you" on YouTube. No kidding. If it's on the internet, you know it must be true. This was actually a demo of InstaPrevue, a feature being built into Onkyo's network-enabled a/v receivers. The cool part, aside from the talking dog, is that you can view picture insets showing the content of source components as opposed to prosaic text labels like HDMI1, HDMI2, or that classic of the genre, HDMI3. The talking dog (have we mentioned the talking dog?) was being streamed from an iPhone via MHL, or Mobile High-definition Link, another new Onkyo receiver feature. Onkyo was also talking up cloud storage capability for receivers via its partnership with MP3tunes. The first two gigabytes are free.

I arrived in Vegas on Sunday just in time to attend the Toshiba party at Tao, an ultra-hip nightspot at the Venetian. Among several demos on hand was this 55-inch 4K flat panel showing real 4K images, which looked stunning. It's also an intriguing autostereoscopic (glasses-free) 3D display, which Barb Gonzalez will tell you about in a separate post.