January is the month when half the UK hi-fi industry--usually the half that can't pull rank or come up with a good enough excuse--heads off to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

I don't do Vegas, 'cos, frankly, once was one time too many. Only a small part of the show has anything to do with specialist hi-fi, and a much smaller part still has UK relevance, so I'm happy to hang on until the Bristol event in late February.

But I can still get some idea of what was going down, thanks to a bit of web-surfing, and there's no denying that CES can provide the big picture context of the ocean of electronics in which the hi-fi minnow is swimming.

For more than a decade, the specialist hi-fi sector has been gradually distancing itself from mainstream consumer electronics, and recreating something akin to the niche market that developed in the 1950s and '60s.

All the signs point towards that process continuing, as the changes and trends seen at CES hardly seem to indicate a future meeting of the ways. For example, there seemed little encouragement for those hoping that 'high-band' optical discs such as SACD and/or DVD-A would provide a major boost for the serious hi-fi sector. Both formats are still alive, to be sure, but they didn't seem to be receiving much in the way of attention or 'shove'.

Instead, reflecting the increasing importance of Internet downloading for music software, the main audio attention seemed focused on computers and their peripherals. Apple's tiny iPod hard-disk personal has already been a huge commercial success in the downloading world, so a new 4GB iPod Mini, barely larger than a credit card and "capable of holding 1,000 songs" is certain to be even bigger.

The iPod has even won plaudits in the hi-fi community--it was recently rated 'Budget Component of the Year' by respected US 'high end' magazine Stereophile--though at present it's pretty much a stand-alone product.

However, the success of the iPod probably heralds a format war on the downloading front, as it uses different encoding/decoding and file transfer formats from Microsoft's Windows Media platform.

Exactly how this will affect things over the long haul is impossible to say --no responsible journalist can ever accurately predict the development or outcome of format conflict.