The LA Home Electronics show is kinda like a CES-lite. For all that, there were a lot of high-end gear manufacturers there, setting up their booths and blasting tunes to roomfuls of rapt audio nuts. I wandered around with a mini-disk recorder (there were a few amused raised eyebrows at such niche audio gear – guess it didn’t have praesodymium-hafnium magnets in it, so it was obviously plebian) and a camera to record the fun.
The main impression I came away with is that Sony is absolutely bathed in flopsweat: they are seriously clenched-jaw freeked at the thought that their Blu-Ray franchise is shaping up to be Betamax. I’ve written about this before, and seen the stories that others have written about it. But it was impressive to see Sony take over a theater room to project movies (sorry, couldn’t take pictures of a dim projected image) while also having a separate room to show off its monitors.
To top it all off, at the end of the day, Sony arranged for a couple of busloads of people to get ferried over to the Sony lot to take in a gala demonstration of how gee-whiz wonderful the whole Blu-Ray standard is … or will be, once it actually hits the store shelves. 
Meanwhile, the digerati wandering the hallways with their bags of XM radio swag muttered darkly about how the new Sony disks would probably also put tracking viruses onto your hard drive.