The Demise of an Audio/Video
Institution
It was a decade ago this month. The
first hint came from our cab driver -- spotting our nametags, he put one and one together
and asked us if there was some sort of convention in town. It was a reasonable enough
question from someone who makes his living ferrying visitors around the city, but it would
have been unheard of a couple of years before. Even the previous year.
The Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago was a big
deal for the best part of 30 years, and now here was a cabby who didn't know it was
even taking place. What was for many years the largest trade show in the United States had
become something the media might talk about when they ran out of information about World
Cup soccer. And the taxi companies obviously hadn't warned their drivers to expect
hundreds of thousands of out-of-town customers.
But until 1994, the Chicago show had been the Valhalla for
a generation of audio and video buffs. It was only open to the trade, to be sure, but it
had always been the place where new technology was introduced, where reactions were
canvassed, and where the industry and press met to decide what was going to take off and
what wasn't. Even those who didn't get to attend could drool over the goodies reported in
the ensuing months by the electronics press.
For those who didn't grow up dreaming of phono cartridges
and electrostatic speakers, it's probably hard to imagine the impact of a first visit to
the CES on someone who'd read about it for years (in my case, it was in 1972, when the
show was just five years old). Walking into the huge main hall of McCormick Place on the
shore of Lake Michigan was overwhelming. The sheer quantity of equipment and the
elaborateness of the exhibits were staggering, even for someone not entirely unfamiliar
with hi-fi shows.
And in those days, it was all about hi-fi. Sure the TV guys
were there, mostly with huge displays, but there really weren't very many of them. And the
lower level of the show teemed with the hawkers of calculators, watches and pre-cellular,
pre-cordless telephones. But the big displays up front were all audio: Panasonic and
Pioneer, Sony and Sanyo, Fisher, H.H. Scott, Koss, Yamaha, Marantz, Toshiba, JBL, Altec.
The biggies.
Every meeting room in the place housed exhibits as well,
and the long, wide halls in the lower level were lined with portable sound-demo rooms for
the smaller companies. Next door, the McCormick Inn turned over every square foot of
public space -- and a fair number of bedrooms, as well -- to hi-fi exhibits, and there was
a whole separate high-end section of the show across town at another hotel. And, somewhere
along the way, McCormick's management glassed in a huge, open bus and taxi delivery area
for more exhibit space, which housed a massive show-within-a-show devoted to car stereo.
At its peak, the Chicago CES was almost impossible for a
single scribe to walk around, let alone cover in detail. In later years, the Chicago event
was gradually matched in size, then overtaken, by its sister show in Las Vegas in January.
And the dominance of audio has been eroded considerably, mostly by video games and
computer products. But there was still something about the Chicago event.
The rambling, sprawling part of the business continued to
be audio. The games and computers were neatly housed in a single, newly built hall, the
phones and watches were in the lower level where they'd always been, but audio was
splattered all over town. In the last couple of years, video was let in the door -- home
theater had to have pictures after all -- but hi-fi always held its own.
Until June 1994. Then, if you'd wandered into the hall at
McCormick Place North, where the computer and games stuff were, you might have thought it
was the show of old: noisy, boisterous, and crowded. But across the street was an
unbelievable spectacle -- unbelievable to me, anyway.
Where the show once filled every corner of two levels of
McCormick, it was now restricted to one floor, and it didn't even fill that. The main hall
had a huge, empty ad hoc restaurant at the back -- a sure sign of unsold space. The
former car-stereo hall held the press room and some registration and publication tables,
but nothing more. The hotel next door had been torn down, and most of the big audio names
gave the CES a miss.
It was announced that the next year the summer show would
have a different name, a different time, a different city, and a different focus. That
year’s show bombed, and this failure would never be repeated.
But for many of us, audio would never be the same without
Chicago.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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