Everything Old Is New Again

People scour the aisles of CES to find the newest "it." But sometimes the newest "it" is a high-tech Groundhog Day (the movie), just a repeat of the past. So imagine the surprise when you see the latest in vacuum tube technology being featured on the show floor.

Vacuum tubes, by the way, are not for cleaning floors. They were the building blocks of some of the first consumer electronic devices. Think glass tubes with the air sucked out. Inside the tubes are metal electrodes that are arranged in such a way that they can control and amplify signals. For a nice overview, see Wikipedia.

Anyway, for 99.99999 percent or more of all applications, vacuum tubes have been replaced by solid-state electronics. A device with the complexity of the modern PC or the diminutive size of the current iPhone just wouldn't be possible using vacuum tubes. But the vacuum tube business just refuses to go way. In the world of consumer electronics, the only remaining application for vacuum tubes is in very high-end home audio systems, where some aficionados love the smooth, somewhat liquid sound they produce.

Who woulda thunk that in my first 15 minutes on the show floor I'd find two vendors who married the iPod to the vacuum tube? The first is a Canadian company called Interactive Toy Concepts with an iPod speaker system using a vacuum tube amplifier called a PRO-POD. For just $599, you can have tubes glowing on your desk, pumping out the songlist on your iPod. I'm not sure you can hear the difference on a system using desktop speakers, but there is no doubt that, once I noticed the tubes, it dawned on me that it was the coolest-looking iPod speaker system I'd ever seen.

The beauty queen award goes to the TP-5MS. It's a vacuum tube meets iPod retro design from NSP technology of Taiwan. The company offers several models of tube amplifiers, including the TP-5MS, which is an iPod dock and amplifier, and the TP-35MiB, which even has Bluetooth. Where the PRO-POD is cool in a subtle way, the TP-35MiB is beautiful in an industrial way, with the tubes glowing within a chrome embrace and beautiful glowing power meters. And to top it off, in a CES dominated by air guitars and loud music, the TP-35MiB was playing Puccini. Everything old is new again.