For manufacturers who do want to demonstrate their wares, there’s always the option of BYO (bring your own) headphones. Yes, it requires an adjustment in approach and equipment provision, but done properly, it could certainly generate interesting and meaningful results, while separate provision (spaced rooms or sound cabins?) might be provided for presenting loudspeakers – possibly on the same basis as the main listening rooms. Either way, just as visitors need to understand and appreciate the new landscape and the opportunities it offers, manufacturers need to adjust their presentations.
But most important of all, venues that offer ten (or more) decent rooms are plentiful. Suddenly, the choice of venue ceases to be the dominant factor and location, access and the wider range of facilities and entertainment come into play. Let’s take Paris as an example. Organise a traditional show and the range of venues is limited and less than inspiring (as demonstrated by the several traditional shows that are struggling to survive in the French capital). But look for a venue with ten large spaces and plentiful display areas and smaller rooms and suddenly you’ are presented with multiple options, any one of which could deliver excellent results. And you’d be in Paris, with its massive array of Hotels (from the genuinely affordable to the ludicrously expensive), restaurants (ditto), museums, galleries and music venues, excellent transport system, rail links and it is an international hub for air travel. Being Paris, it brings its own organisational and cultural challenges, but they’re relatively easy to overcome.
You could make a case for any number of other cities, or even for regular, rotating venues – as per CES. But what opens up these opportunities is the dual realisation that the industry needs a different kind of major show and that it’s going to have to organise it for itself. The model outlined above for B2C events is both logical and proven. The proposal for an effective B2B/prestige event might be more radical and would certainly need a lot more work, but as a starting point or basis for discussion, it offers a lot more promise than the current, sorry state of affairs. Of course, it would depend on members of the famously fractious audio industry actually cooperating and putting personal interest aside for the greater good, but hey, just because they don’t doesn’t mean they can’t. The High-End Society in Germany and the Bristol Show in the UK have both demonstrated considerable success and longevity. Maybe that, more than any other lesson, is the one that we all need to learn.
