Tech Q: 2009 Consumer Electronics Show

Some of us are bad consumers. Not computer geeks though. (Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard is proof of this.)

But our Resident Geek, Peter Cook, is a thoughtful consumer. In today's Tech Q? column he virtually goes to one of the biggest computer/electronics trade shows so you don't have to -- and tells us music and radio lovers what might be worth buying... or not. Over to you, Peter:

"Each January the Consumer Electronics Show takes place in Las Vegas. This is a massive trade show where new products are announced and hyped. I've never had the "pleasure" of attending one of these things but I gather one will find: a lot of junk; some vaporware (it was supposed to be hardware or software, but it never actually shipped!); some genuinely useful devices; and every once in a while a real breakthrough technology (the VCR, CD, DVD, HDTV all were introduced at CES).

The 2009 version of the show took place last week. I read a bit of coverage and was most interested in the announcements of potential interest to Radio 2 listeners (we'll steer clear of the 3-D televisions).

Internet Radio for the car

The first item that caught my eye was the news that venerable car-audio manufacturer Blaupunkt (warning: noisy web page) had partnered with miRoamer (warning: poorly-designed web page) to bring internet radio to your car. Ooh la la! That would certainly be a breakthrough.

My excitement faded a bit once I got past the headline. You'll need a G3-equipped cell phone and a data plan to pick up the internet radio station (nothing new here). You then connect to your miRoamer account where you've stored your favourite radio stations (many other's already use this model). The audio is sent from your cell phone via bluetooth to the Blaupunkt (sound quality bottleneck?).

OK, it's a prototype and I'm rolling my eyes at the claims of "we're first". But the message here is that consumers want internet radio in their car and big name manufacturers are getting into the game, trying to figure out how to deliver the product.

One way or another, internet radio will come to the car.

Internet Radio for the home

Of course consumers don't just want internet radio in the car. They want it in the home and so CES saw announcements of new internet radio products from Acoustic Research, iLuv, iRiver, Linksys, Myine, Philips, Sonneteer, sonoro, Sony, VTech. . . Need I go on?

Speaking of Sony, CEO Howard Stringer reiterated his promise that by 2011 90% of Sony's products will be internet-capable. Radios, TVs, mp3 players . . . everything. It's no longer just the computer-oriented start ups building devices like internet radio. Consumer electronics companies know that their future lies in being connected to the internet.

Palm Pre

Palm has apparently risen from the near-dead thanks to their new Pre smartphone (from John Rubinstein, the guy who led the development of the iMac and iPhone while he was at Apple).

Internet-connected, multi-media mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry Storm, Palm Pre and more based on OS's from Google and Microsoft) can be portable internet radios.

Cooling Off?

Maybe I didn't look hard enough but there was not much news related to Satellite Radio or HD Radio. My guess is that the former will morph and that the latter is toast.

Surround Sound Music at Last?

Had I been at CES, the booth I personally would have been most interested in visiting would have been Fraunhofer's. Their 2009 CES breakthrough was a demonstration of their MPEG Surround format playing back on an iPod.

According to Wired Fraunhofer say "there is an unsigned contract with a well-known PC player application."

Let's imagine for a moment that they are talking about Apple (Fraunhofer have a plug-in for Quicktime and iTunes) and that the deal goes through. The surround-encoded music you'd buy from the iTunes store would play back normally on a regular stereo system but when played back through a surround sound system would deliver full, discrete 5.1 sound rather like what you hear at the movie theatre.

"An unsigned contract". I wonder what that's worth?

But let's continue to dream for a moment. Recording engineers, producers and musicians who are keen on surround sound have watched surround carriers come and go for years. We've all got our fingers crossed again. If this kick starts the industry there's no reason we couldn't deliver surround sound via internet radio.