Lovers leave, and friends will let you down. But an HDTV home cinema suite is for ever - and it was perhaps with this in mind that thousands of people descended on a hotel beside the Hammersmith flyover this weekend for The Best of Stuff, an orgy of technology described by its organisers as "the greatest gadget show on earth". They came from across the country: young and old, black and white, united only by their reverence for sleek, high-end entertainment equipment. And, if we're being honest, their Y chromosomes. There are numerous beautiful women in the pages of Stuff magazine, clutching MP3 players and HDD camcorders to their chests, but the show was an almost exclusively male affair.
A snarky observer - or a woman - might have watched the men, as they gently manipulated extendable brackets for flatscreen TVs, and thought first of Alan Partridge. (Specifically, the observer might have recalled the scene in which Steve Coogan's character leverages his local celebrity to arrange after-hours tours of Dixons in Norwich. "Nice action," he purrs, sampling the eject mechanisms of various tape decks. "Nice action.") But for anyone with even a modicum of technology obsession, it was hard to keep one's excitement entirely in check.
"This offers a space to get away from the pressures of the environment," said a besuited salesman, demonstrating the Oculas - a one-person pod, or "private relaxation theatre", in which the occupant reclines on a red-leather massage chair, receiving a "unique synthesis of sensory impact" via immersive sound and a touchscreen video display. "Yeah, it's good," said Jan Ilett, a Manchester university student, as the pod opened and disgorged him. "But, when you think about it, really quite antisocial." Around the corner, visitors took turns to sit in a mocked-up living room while they listened to rock music on loudspeakers from the audio company Ferguson Hill - vast, entirely translucent shells, 1.65m high. "They look," said a sceptical Ollie Moseley, "like a bath." The accompanying bass boosters looked like clear plastic beach balls. "Everyone's always got to have the latest thing, but I don't mind that," said Kish Makwana, who, like many of those in attendance, was a dealer as well as an enthusiast.
The demographics of techno-lust are not uniform, and it was notable that the company that defines the notion for many - Apple - wasn't present at all. Apple, in fact, is an exception to the gadget rule. Its aesthetic is as much feminine as masculine - metrosexual, maybe - and its products are about being on the move (thus the ever lighter laptops, and ever smaller iPods).
But the Best of Stuff, when it came down to it, was about being a man, and kitting out your home with a home cinema set-up to knock all other home cinema set-ups flat, or at least to make sure they knew which home cinema set-up was boss, and then sitting down, and staying there. There are, doubtless, complex explanations for this, derived from evolutionary psychology. But as soon as you start watching The Matrix on a metre-wide high-resolution flatscreen with surround sound, you'll stop worrying about them.
