Imagine a metropolitan railway station, sky-high girders curving across in a giant arc, murky glass, vast neo-Georgian pillars... with no trains... nicely carpeted... and filled with the most up to date home entertainment equipment. That was the scene for the Great Home Entertainment Spectacular, held at Olympia between 17th-25th September. And amid the plethora of video games, video films, calculators and watches, came a good few surprises on both the music and computer fronts for the thousands of people who filed through the hall during the week.

JVC dominated the centre of the hall with their stand that was set up to show the best sides of the Victorinox range and their new stereo keyboards - with the KB500F, complete with its chromed keyboard drawing no few admirers. Their ranges of hi-fi and video equipment were also represented there, but the centrepiece was a demonstration of the Karaoke. This is a new development on the idea of cabaret (and many other) artists using backing tapes for their performances. The Karaoke includes two cassette players (one for recording the whole performance, the other for backing playback) an eight track cartridge for continuous playing, and a combination type amplifier and speaker cabinet. In Japan these type of units have been very popular for many years (350,000 sold in 1980...) but this seems to be the first time that a concerted effort has been made to introduce them to the British market. The demo at the JVC stand was in the form of a talent show, with members of the audience coming up to select a song to sing or play. The backing tapes JVC have compiled are a massive selection of standards and cabaret/show numbers, on numbered and indexed cassettes.

Just across the passage, National Panasonic had built a huge Digital Theatre, within which they showed off their new FM range of video recorders, the Compact Disc player, and, of course, the new Technics PCM-E Series digital organ, with an exciting troup of New York dancers to round everything off.

City Music, Maidenhead Organ Studios, and Western Music (among others) staged displays of high tech keyboards, with the DX7 drawing many people, musicians and just interesteds. David Burrows of City Music shepherded people onto the stand - seemingly to be able to watch their amazement at the 'state of the art' on display!

It seemed that, for many people at the show, this was their first time 'close up' to the type of equipment technology they had hitherto only seen on Tomorrows World. The Roland stand emphasised this with an open plan stand that allowed everyone to just 'come in and play'.

Judging from the numbers of people who actually did take the plunge, both on Roland and on the amazing Casio stand, this type of hands on exercise is a definite success in introducing to the public instruments that would probably have seemed the preserve of the professional musician.

Certainly there was no shortage of budding Phil Collins on the Mattel stand, where Richard Coughlan of Caravan took the budget Synsonic Drums through their paces.

On the computer front, the 'hands on' policy also showed its worth, and the set up systems, and the programs that were available, allowed a lot of 'instant education' on the finer art of the chip to take place. New products here included the Acorn Electron home micro which is a 32K RAM machine, designed to be compatible with the Acorn BBC micro. The Electron costs around half that of the BBC model. The Acorn Econet local area network was also on show - a system with the ability to link together over 250 BBC machines.

Centre of the 'ZX fanclub' was, of course, the Sinclair Research stand, where the absence of any computer music seemed somewhat strange considering the numbers of musicians present at the show.

Among the many computer accessory exhibitors, BiBi Magnetics were at the show to display some of their cassette, computer and storage tapes. Amongst them were examples of their 'custom' cassettes, which they will process, cut to length required, and duplicate high quality tapes for data storage.

The hi fi world were very well represented, with a host of manufacturers appearing. Aiwa displayed their commitment to Midi with their digital cassette systems, the 'AD' range. Prices of these start at around £229 for the AD-F660 up to the AD-F990. Possible mastering machines, the digital concept of the AD-F990 allows compatibility with most hi fi and pro audio equipment, a compatibility AIWA call Digital Automatic Tape Adaptation or DATA, where a microprocessor will correctly adjust the signals from the AD-F990 to almost any other machine.

Unsuspecting visitors' ears were treated to some dramatic demonstrations on the Red Acoustics stand. The Red range of self powered speakers have been available for some time now, and the manufacturers are widening their ranges to cover the small studio or high power domestic market. The Red A-4 and the Red A-SB come directly into this category. The internal amplifiers are rated at 100W, and the Red A-SB model also contains a sub bass (active) system making it ideal for the wide frequency ranges of synths and other keyboard instruments.

Just a very brief selection of some of the many new products and innovations that were on show at the Great Home Entertainment Spectacular. Definitely a show that deserves success, if only for the way that it allowed everyone to view, and try, a range of equipment and instruments that would otherwise be impossible to find under one roof.

But what a roof...