While there are some folks that are so-called "early adopters" that do help drive parts of the consumer electronic industry and A/V enthusiasts the emphasis from many firms this years seems to have been more on refinement than blockbuster new products.

I see this as a needed thing and one that ought to be helpful to higher end products. The trend with many companies had been "all new" and now that so many firms are emphasizing BETTER quality I believe the pay off will be that instead of a checklist of "features" that really are more about buzzword based marketing we may actually see (and hear) more products that more accurately reproduce recorded sounds / images.

I doubt that there be a overnight shift at the big box stores away from junky HTIB and toward solidly built high value separates, but the subtle shift that it is hinted at by things like the proliferation of external DACs (which exist pretty much solely becuase the sonic improvent over "lowest oost" digital-to-analog converters are so obvious...) ought to be a long term benefit to those of us hobbyists that hear (or like to beleive we hear...)the difference between some inexpensive amp with wimpy power reserves and the signficantly more hefty products that make the Outlaw Audio company exist...

This period of relative stability is also a good thing for the ability of consumers to really assess the utility of things like HDMI and manufacturers to be able to catch-up on the steep curve of supporting HDCP and other technologies. This is especially important for smaller firms that were never at the table with the "standards committee" or had the R&D staff to point out the pitfalls of promissing to simplify the behind-the-scenes difficiculties of making the digital bits from one source march along the right path toward the ultimate analog reproduction of sound.

While I have been an enthusiast long enough to know that rarely has quality been a big driver of consumer electronics I do suspect that the economic hard times that have forced most people to be a little more prudent with their discretionary spending means fewer firms that make / sell disposable products will have as easy a road to success as they may have had when money seemed to grow on trees. Mind you I am not going to argue that these tough times make it easy for firms to side with "quality" over "cost cutting" , but that it will mean more purchasers will be scrutinizing the "value" they get from their expenditures -- a trend that also should reward firms less concerned with "profit per unit" that overall "growth of the brand"...

There will be no shortage of companies that zig when they should have zagged against the seemingly endless onslaught of firms willing to diminish their perceived value with junky products that do not deliver on their hype, but that underlying sentiment I have picked up from numerous segements of the consumer electronics reports is that advertising that shout out "low price" have more and more turned off purchasers when that also means "no service / low reliabity / high return rate". The original immmpetus for "value oriented" A/V firms like Outlaw may have been the stratospheric prices commanded for some pretty basic technology but more and more converts could also come to see that spending a bit more than the low prices suggested for mass market goods hawked at the store of the infamous "yellow tag" could also mean more time spend enjoying what you watch / listen to and less time regretting the buying experience.

I haven't followed CES as closely this year as I have in some past years. I've been pleased to see that there's still development on OLED displays, which is a technology that I've been optimistic about for many years now. The noise about 4K displays and upscaling was also interesting - it's an inevitable next step that I am more interested in than the 3D craze that has swirled around for several years now, but likely still a ways away from average user adoption. Feature lists are still a priority with many companies and consumers, but at least (as far as I've heard) surround processors and receivers aren't being too shaken up this year.