I came for the SSL but stayed for the Holophone H2.

Hanson Hsu, owner and principal of Delta H Design has jsut stopped by, with Ian Dittbrennner of Yahoo Music…so tell me Hanson and Ian, how’s Vegas so far?

Vegas is great, very curious as to what Google is doing here! They’ve got some interesting new ad sets on radio with touch screen controllers ~ interesting to see what market penetration will be. Having fun checking out the new technologies with Ian. Oh, and hanging with the girls at Mix of course….: -)

So I’m there at the Harrison booth talking with Gary, finding out that their Trion board is selling big at under $150k (four in the last nine months to Germany, another to The Post Group in L.A., and a film board to Taipei). He says that the name of the game is twice the power at half the cost, and they did it by building out the processor with AMD dual-core technology. As we’re talking, in walks our old friend Jonathan Porath, former chief engineer at Sound One in New York. Looking good, and telling tales of his last two years traveling around the world with his family. Last year he figured he needed to get his kids back in school, so they settled in Shanghai. Turns out he’s networking, staying out of trouble, and taking the lay of the land. Shanghai, it seems, has a commercial business but not much of a film biz. Stories of state-of-the-art technology right next to dirt floors. But there is room there for some business, he says. We’ll see how long he can stay idle…Good to see you jonathan

It is exactly 1,082 steps from my hotel room to the Silicon Graphics booth.

I know this because I have scored the swag of the show-an SGI pedometer. Now when we editors brag about logging miles visiting booth after booth, we have the numbers to prove it. Does schlepping around the convention floor count as a workout?

Maybe if I gave up the high heels…

Well Karl Winkler is here from Lectrosonics to tell us about some new transmitter products…Karl?

It’s been a great show for us so far. Monday was busy from the start. We’re introducing new versions of our SM series - the SMA (super-small, single AA battery), SMDA (dual-AA version for longer battery life) and the SMQA (250mW version). The updates include a variable high-pass filter addressable in the LCD menu, and a GoreTex membrane for pressure equalization in moist environments (lets air in and out but not water). Also new is the UM450 transmitter, a standard size belt pack unit with 250mW RF power, detachable antenna and variable high-pass filter. All these new transmitters are starting to ship in May.

The trick for console makers in this broadcast world is how to get more channels into a smaller footprint and not raise the price. That’s the demand of a 5.1 world, with more audio passed around in larger chunks. Calrec has announced a new mid-level console, Omega, incorporating Bluefin technology, with 160 mono DSP paths (48 stereo plus 64 mono), available in three frame sizes (24, 40, 56). It includes 8 x 5.1 surround groups, 20 aux outs and an additional 48 outs, with two main stereo or 5.1 surround program outputs. This powerful board should find a home in the new generation of mid- to smaller HD trucks that are sure to be coming out in the next few years (think college sports). QVC purchased the first Omega for its new 48-foot truck. The secret, it turns out, is Bluefin’s use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays replacing the traditional SHARC chips, allowing 480 channel processing paths on a single card. Apparently they’ve been incorporating FPGAs for the past three years on the Alpha and Sigma lines to handle mix functions. Lots of power in a small package. That’s what we all need, no?