CEDIA ’26: The Stuff I Should Have Dragged My Friends Over to See

Loren wasn’t at CEDIA.

A lot of his friends weren’t there either.

ChatGPT wasn’t there, despite what the next several thousand words may suggest.

And yet, after wandering through enough photographs, product launches, demo-room reports, manufacturer posts, videos and post-show chest-thumping, it will begin to feel suspiciously like somebody had been there.

Without the airport.

Without the convention-center coffee.

Without the hangovers.

Without COVID.

Wait.

Wrong CEDIA.

So this is not a show report.

It is an entirely unauthorized reconstruction of the things Loren probably would have dragged his friends across the show floor to see, had he dusted off his power wheelchair, hauled it to Denver, and found any of them actually standing there with their toes exposed to the very real danger of being run over.

None of that happened.

Loren stayed home.

A lot of the friends apparently did too.

The wheelchair remained blissfully uninvolved.

And somehow the AI still came back with a show report.

There is only one rule for making this list.

DreamWall: Wait. That Thing ROLLS?

This probably would have been stop number one.

DreamWall came to CEDIA with a broad working display of its MicroLED thinking across residential, commercial, indoor, outdoor and portable applications.

Useful.

Then somebody apparently decided a giant MicroLED wall should also be able to leave the room.

Enter the DreamWall Monarch.

A giant MicroLED display that can fold down, move through an ordinary doorway or elevator, and rise back into viewing position changes the assumptions around where an enormous display is allowed to live.

Because now this is not just a theater conversation.

• A great room.
• A corporate presentation space.
• Hospitality.
• A golf simulator.
• Worship.
• Events.
• A luxury home where somebody wants the enormous picture but does not particularly want the enormous construction project.

That is where a product stops being another screen and starts changing what kind of project you can imagine.

And this is also probably where Loren would have started mentally assigning the thing to dealers who had not returned his phone calls yet.

Not naming names.

Yet.

Krix + Trinnov + MC²: Sometimes 30,000 Watts Is Actually the Subtle Part

Sound Room 5 would have been dangerous territory for exposed toes and probably several internal organs.

Krix brought a serious immersive cinema system, including an eight-subwoofer low-frequency array built around its new UCX-118.

Trinnov WaveForming sat in the middle of the whole affair.

MC² amplification supplied enough power to make the phrase “ample headroom” feel medically inadequate.

More than 30,000 watts were available to the room.

That is a magnificent number.

It is also not really the point.

The point is what all of that hardware was trying to do with bass.

Not simply make more of it.

Control it.

Shape it.

Make it behave consistently across more than one seat.

This is the difference between:

That is a much more useful demonstration.

Because most clients do not hand over perfect concrete bunkers with ideal geometry and say, “Do whatever you want.”

They hand over houses.

Sometimes beautiful houses.

Sometimes acoustically deranged houses.

Usually both.

So when Trinnov starts extending WaveForming into rooms that previously would not have been ideal candidates, that is not merely a technology story.

That is a project story.

And project stories are where dealers make money.

Trinnov: And Then AI Walked Into the Equipment Rack

AI was predictably everywhere at CEDIA.

It must have been.

It wrote this entire story.

More accurately, it reconstructed this story from the digital breadcrumbs left behind by the people who actually went.

Which may be the most 2026 thing about this entire exercise.

But Trinnov’s AI conversation caught its attention for a different reason.

Most AI demonstrations in AV are easy to imagine.

Attach a chatbot to a manual.

Ask it why HDMI stopped working.

Give it a pleasant voice.

Tell everyone the future has arrived.

Trinnov was talking about something deeper.

AI working against the actual Altitude architecture. AI being used to assist performance and calibration. Not to replace the calibrator. Potentially to make the calibrator more capable.

That is a very different proposition.

We have spent a lot of time talking about AI changing sales, marketing, support and business operations.

It is easy to forget that eventually it was going to walk into the rack too.

Apparently it already has.

And since the AI writing this is now discussing another AI embedded in a Trinnov processor at a show neither AI attended, we should probably keep moving before the article folds in on itself.

PMC: Some Things Come Back Around

PMC’s room caught its attention for a different reason.

But Loren did not need the AI to explain PMC to him.

At the turn of the century, when he opened the first showroom for his integration business, the demo theater was chock full of PMC.

Including the big-boy transmission-line subwoofer.

So this one carries a little history.

PMC is not some interesting new brand that wandered onto the radar after CEDIA. It is part of Loren’s own reference point for what a serious demo theater was supposed to be.

Which makes its appearance at CEDIA ’26 feel less like discovery and more like seeing an old friend walk into the room wearing a very expensive new suit.

PMC’s CEDIA cinema demonstration carried that professional-monitoring DNA into a modern private-cinema system.

And that gives the story a much better question than, “Here is another premium cinema speaker.”

That is sleeve-grab territory.

Because now the stop is not just about specifications.

It is about continuity.

A brand that was part of Loren’s first showroom at the beginning of his integration career is still pushing into serious private cinema more than two decades later.

That makes the CEDIA room personal.

And if the AI had actually been there, it probably would have had enough sense to drag Loren over there first.

Even if Loren already knew the way.

Vicoustic: The Stuff You’re Not Supposed to Notice

This is where the article has to work a little harder.

Nobody goes to CEDIA bragging that they found the sexiest bass trap.

At least nobody we want to have lunch with.

But Vicoustic is exactly the kind of line that matters more the longer you stay in this business.

The speakers get the glamour shot.

The processor gets the interface.

The amplifiers get the big numbers.

The room treatment gets to stand there quietly and make all of them sound better.

Which is a pretty good trick.

Loren already knows this from years of designing and demonstrating rooms. You can spend a fortune on equipment and still lose the fight to glass, drywall, dimensions, reflections and the general architectural chaos of somebody’s otherwise beautiful home.

So Vicoustic earns the sleeve grab for a completely different reason.

Not because it is flashy.

Because it fixes the part everybody else has to live inside.

Not exactly fireworks.

Very useful.

And useful tends to outlive fireworks.

Focal/Naim: Where Did the Equipment Rack Go?

This one points toward a much bigger shift.

Focal and Naim showed that serious audio is getting increasingly comfortable with the idea of disappearing.

Not sonically.

Physically.

The Diva concept brings loudspeakers, amplification, streaming, DSP and connectivity into a far more integrated system than the traditional high-end stack.

That changes the shape of the client conversation.

You can still have serious sound.

You can still have serious engineering.

You can still have serious money involved.

You may just not need six boxes, two giant amplifiers and an equipment rack that looks like it should have its own property tax bill.

This is not the death of traditional high-end audio.

Quite the opposite.

It is another entrance into it.

And that matters because some of the best clients in the world love music and hate equipment.

Architects understand this.

Interior designers understand this.

Spouses understand this with breathtaking clarity.

The industry appears to be catching up.

And this is where Cabasse and Loewe belong in the same larger conversation.

Different engineering.

Different aesthetics.

Different histories.

Same shift.

Focal/Naim and Cabasse/Loewe challenge the assumption that high-end audio has to be, or more importantly, look complicated.

That distinction matters, because the client may love everything high-end audio can do while having absolutely no interest in living with everything high-end audio traditionally looks like.

The technology is getting better at getting out of its own way.

The speakers can become sculptural.

The electronics can disappear.

The screen can become part of the architecture.

The room can still sound extraordinary without announcing, from across the house, that somebody spent the college fund at an audiophile convention.

The makers are integrating at the micro level, so we do not have to keep doing it at the messy macro level.

When amplification, streaming, DSP, room correction, connectivity and control are increasingly resolved inside the product, the integrator gets to spend less time forcing boxes to cooperate and more time designing the experience.

That is a much more interesting future for CI.

Cabasse + Loewe: The Room Is Allowed to Be Beautiful Too

This is another one Loren did not need the AI to explain to him.

He already learned the lesson firsthand.

A pair of Cabasse Pearl Akoyas sat in his home office and quietly wrecked the afternoon.

Three hours disappeared.

Work stopped.

Music took over.

That was not marketing copy.

That actually happened.

So when Cabasse and Loewe show up together, the interesting part is not that one company makes speakers and the other makes televisions.

It is that both start from the assumption that the technology belongs in the room as something worth looking at.

Loewe has spent decades treating the television as part of the interior.

Cabasse seems perfectly comfortable treating the loudspeaker as sculpture.

Put those ideas together and the system starts feeling less like equipment inserted into architecture and more like architecture that happens to play music and movies.

That is a different kind of high-end.

Less equipment collection.

More environment.

Magnetar: This One Isn’t Ours. The Machine Dragged Us Over Anyway.

There is a small editorial violation happening here.

Magnetar is not part of the Scowcroft-represented story.

The machine checked.

The machine has rules.

The machine then ignored one of them.

Because a truly serious universal physical-media transport showing up in 2026 is exactly the kind of thing that makes this whole exercise fun.

At the exact moment when everything is supposed to be dissolving into the cloud, somebody built a machine for playing the things we actually own.

• Records are still here.
• CDs are still here.
• Blu-rays are still here.
• Concert discs.
• Movies.
• Collections.
• The boxes in the closet.
• The shelves in the den.
• The things somebody chose, bought, kept and moved across three houses.

Streaming did not fail.

Streaming won.

Convenience is undefeated.

But convenience did not kill ownership.

It did not kill ritual.

Loren has been circling this idea for a while:

The AI apparently went to CEDIA and found supporting evidence.

Again, the AI did not go to CEDIA.

This article is becoming less trustworthy by the paragraph.

So What Did We Actually Miss?

Probably not the products.

The intersections.

DreamWall changes what a giant display is allowed to be.

Krix, MC² and Trinnov change how bass can be designed into a room instead of repaired afterward.

PMC connects Loren’s own history in serious theater to what the company is doing now.

Vicoustic reminds us that the room itself is part of the system.

Focal/Naim and Cabasse/Loewe challenge the assumption that high-end audio has to be, or more importantly, look complicated.

It is integration finally behaving like true system integration.

The makers are integrating at the micro level, so we do not have to keep doing it at the messy macro level.

That means less time forcing boxes to cooperate.

More time designing the experience.

And Trinnov suggests that AI may not simply become another thing we sell.

It may become part of how we practice the craft.

That is the stuff Loren would have dragged his friends over to see.

Had Loren been there.

Had the friends been there.

Had the wheelchair been charged.

Had everybody kept their toes out of the danger zone.

None of that happened.

So the machine did the walking afterward.

Which may be the real lesson.

Next year, make the list before the show.

Actually go.

Find the stuff worth dragging people toward.

And if Loren comes rolling down the aisle with that particular look on his face, consider yourself warned.

Protect your toes.