Rohan Marley, son of reggae legend Bob Marley, is here to sell headphones. They’re supposedly eco-friendly, but something tells me that the majority of people buying these things don’t really care.

A name, you see, is important, and it’s the reason why those of Dr. Dre and Travis Barker and 50 Cent and will.i.am are all here. I’m not really sure how working as a musician makes you uniquely qualified to hawk headphones and speakers and audio equipment (I guess the two endeavours both involve sound), but the practice is rife at the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, and it’s made the world of music technology a very boring place.

I want you to imagine a room the size of an airplane hanger, filled with booths and booths and booths. Each is selling earphones and headphones or speakers, or both. It’s impossible to make any reasonable distinction between quality or sound from one booth to the next—instead, you wander zombie-like through the show floor, assaulted by sound, with the sneaking suspicion that, beneath the red ribbon cables and crafted bamboo casings, every single product is exactly the same.

I want you to hold that image dear in your mind, because every year, amidst the January desert chill of Las Vegas, Nevada, this is what CES is like.

House of Marley is here for the second year. A well-meaning public relations representative tried to arrange an interview, but I politely declined. Something tells me that “How is your company different from everyone else here?” wouldn’t elicit the warmest response.

The popularity of Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones clearly caught many off-guard (they were there too), and so we’ve have had this barrage of me-too companies attending the last few shows. The irony, of course, is that alongside Monster and Marley and myriad other brands are the small ODM booths–original design manufacturers, better known as the numerous Chinese factories whose unbranded headphone designs are often licensed and re-branded en-masse by many of the big-name companies exhibiting at the show.

It’s why NFL star Tim Tebow has headphones, and Olypmic runner Usain Bolt. Even Snooki-branded headphones debuted at this year’s show.

One of my favourite products from past years is Teenage Engineering’s OP-1. It’s a portable four-track tape recorder and synthesizer that looks like a miniature toy keyboard, but actually packs some pretty high-quality technology inside. You might have noticed that it’s not a pair of headphones–and that’s precisely why I fell in love.

This year, however, the Swedish company announced a wireless cube-shaped speaker. And, I’ll admit, I was sad. From Jambox to Sonos, these type of devices are everywhere today. But having seen the OP-1, I should have known better. The OD-11, as its called, was different.

Teenage Engineering’s new speaker can stream music from your favourite cloud service (think Rdio or Spotify, though details have yet to be announced) without a phone or tablet or PC. It uses an updated, 60’s-era speaker design from Swedish audio engineer Stig Carlsson. And you can control the volume and song selection with a puck-shaped analog dial that–surprise–is actually portable and separate from the device.

Sure, it’s still a speaker. It exhibited alongside hundreds of other speakers, some designed in the shape of Hello Kitty. But it was just different enough to catch my eye, and didn’t take the startup-savvy of a speaker-minded celeb. It’s a good thing the OD-11 actually looks like a decent product, but as CES showed this year, the bar isn’t high.

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of AUX Magazine. Download and subscribe for free in the App Store.