Techno-paradise
Sun Herald
Sunday January 30, 2000
What's new in the year 2000? Andrew Heasley reports.
LAS Vegas, with its dazzling lights, was a fitting venue for the Consumer Electronics Show 2000, a showcase of technological innovations that threatened to eclipse the neon madness outdoors.
The stars of the show, which was held earlier this month, fell into five broad categories: home-theatre equipment, digital televisions and accessories, high-end audio gear and their bonsai relatives, the ubiquitous MP3 players and Internet telephony products.
In home theatre, Pioneer unveiled its production-ready DVR-1000, a DVD player that also records onto blank DVD-RW discs that can hold 4.7Gb of data (the same capacity as pre-recorded DVD movie discs) and can be re-recorded about 1,000 times.
Pioneer debuted its prototype high-definition DVD recorder, the HD DVD, which uses a single-sided, dual-layer 27.4Gb DVD disc and a short wavelength blue-violet laser sufficient for four hours of 1080-line, interlaced high-definition television broadcast material. The price wasn't disclosed, but the blue-laser component is manufactured by only two companies in the world and costs $3,040 on its own.
Pioneer was matched by Zenith's HDP2000 HD-DVD recorder, which records at 1080i onto an 18Gb single-sided, single-layer DVD disc.
Sony took another tack: its SUR-2000 comes with a 30Gb computer hard drive capable of recording 30 hours of television broadcast, for $610. Philips offered a sneak preview of a set-top box that melds America Online Internet and TV (web TV) - prophetic really, given the recent announcement of the merger between AOL and Time Warner.
Surround-sound received a kick-along with Outlaw Audio's 6.1-channel surround-sound amplifier. The extra channel is a centre-rear one to mirror the front channel outlets. At $918, it's $2,140 cheaper than the only other 6.1-channel surround amplifier by Lexicon.
Super audio CD, a format introduced by Sony that records music at ultra-high sample rates (2,822,400 times per second, 64 times greater than regular CDs) but in 1-bit grabs, was represented by SACD players from Marantz, Philips and Sharp, as well as Sony. Sharp went one further with the SM-SX1, the world's first Super Audio 1-bit amplifier. In conjunction with its DX-SX1 SACD player, the combination allows direct bitstream coupling to convey the recorded material to the speakers "without loss", according to Sharp. The combination can reproduce signals from 5Hz to 100kHz with a dynamic range of 105 decibels, way better than traditional hi-fi specifications.
Creative's Nomad II MP3 player featured a Jukebox docking station about the size of a CD Walkman with 6Gb of internal storage (enough for 150 music CDs) for around $918.
A scene stealer from Casio, the $382 Wrist Audio Player combined a digital wrist watch with an inbuilt MP3 audio player with a 32Mb internal memory, USB download port and a socket for earphones.
Meanwhile, Sony showed its 64Mb Memory Stick Walkman, about the size of a cigarette lighter, which is due for release in the US in March for $503.
But, of all the high-tech gadgetry on display, it was the Skip Doctor, a hand-cranked audio accessory that looks like a circular saw and polishes out scratches from CDs which received the audio innovation award.
* CES highlights are at www.ces2000.org, www.twice.com and www.etown.com.
© 2000 Sun Herald