Roy works on a Defense Department contract looking after stockpiled nuclear weapons, but his passion is building analog hi-fi systems. When we reach the top floor, Roy turns into an empty hallway, takes off his gray "Press" badge—he'd been freelancing as the microphone guy for a Mexican tech video website—and pulls another out of his backpack, this one with "Roy Audio" under his name.

"We have very little sales," Roy says, satisfied with his transformation.

That turns out to be true of most people up on this floor. This is the luxury stratosphere, where vendors can get by on a few top-dollar sales a year. They don't want to waste time with the riffraff. In one room, we were confronted by a woman who told us they were operating on an appointment-only basis. We peered over her shoulder at a cooler of beer and wine. A man appeared behind her and referred us elsewhere for information. "It should be on our website," he said. "So."

We backed out. I wondered why they were so restrictive; Roy guessed that they might be guarding their clients' secrecy; specialized systems sometimes hid their components like some kind of secret recipe. On the other side of the hallway, a little sign on the ground read: "Meeting in Progress. Please visit us on Thursday between 1pm and 2pm for an open house."

After poking into a few rooms, we found one with a demonstration underway, and sank into deeply upholstered chairs. In front of us, two men on a couch were staring straight ahead at a set of tall, slim speakers. That one was an "entry level" system, Roy told me—about $29,000. The exhibitor then readied to show us the real deal, the kind of system that could cost $100,000. Voices are a good way to hear the different sounds in each one, he told us, wielding an iPad to call up something special.

"We hear voices all the time," he joked, waiting a beat before delivering the tired punch line. "Or at least, I know I hear voices all the time." More CES humor.

There was a moment of silence. And then, the sound of humming began, pressing into my ears; I could only think of a giant set of lips opening in the front of the room as the the voice slid into the a moist, deep rendition of "God Bless the Child." The voice was almost uncomfortably close, with flecks of spittle raining on my skull, and as I motioned to Roy we should move on, it felt like escaping a giant's maw into the cool, low-lit corridor.

Spend enough time as a stranger in a new city and you start to think that the best stuff is happening out of view. At CES, this means exclusive product demos. Oh, and the parties.

Not being on many velvet-rope invite lists, I got help from Shane Hamilton, managing principal of Republik Group, which puts on corporate bashes. On Wednesday morning, he's taking care of Red Touch Media's hangover breakfast at the Royal House, a shabby hotel one half-superblock away from the convention center. Make-your-own bloody marys, an oxygen bar, a doctor administering B12 shots ("Good for your sex cycle!"). For the ride back to the conference, we hop into a giant fire-engine-red stretch SUV with flames painted on the interior.

"Anything and everything," Hamilton responds gruffly, when I ask what kinds of requests he gets during CES. "Smurfs, Oompa Loompas, whatever they want." (Examples from other shindigs: For Samsung, it was women imprisoned in cupcakes and champagne; for ClearChannel, it was Ke$ha.) What he can offer depends on the price people are willing to pay, which runs to around $150,000 at the high end.

But it might not be worth it, for branding purposes. "Anything over $50,000, it's like a meatball," Hamilton says. "Gets lost in the sauce."

Lacking the patience to wait hours in front of clubs, I confined my evening outings to some of the more obscure events, like the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' engineering Emmy awards, held somewhere in the bowels of the Bellagio. The New York Times' David Pogue emceed, reassuring the nerds behind our ever-better television viewing experiences that they were just as important as the stars. "They got where they are through genetics!" Pogue cracked, before handing out gold statues for achievements like the invention of the multi-room DVR and the on-screen interactive program guide. "You got where you are through hard work, intelligence, and the scientific method! WIthout you, Megan Fox would be playing fiddler on the roof at some community theater!"

From there, I raced to the MGM Grand, where a younger set had packed a 17th-floor suite for a party thrown by a public relations agency repping a Kickstarter project called Instacube. Wedging myself next to a bar strewn with vodka bottles and empty Red Bull cans, I chatted with a bespectacled British journalist who was mystified by the apparent appeal of this dystopian metropolis. I tried to explain that CES and Vegas deserve each other: These places are the way they are because the answer is always yes, and no two things on earth appeal more strongly to our desires for entertainment, deception, and the overwhelming imperative of novelty.

And then it was time to cool down. If there's an antidote to the flash and the trash that makes up most of CES, it's in Eureka Park, the cute name for three Venetian rooms full of something that isn't supposed to exist: Hardware startups.

Hardware, the conventional wisdom goes, is expensive, which is why only large companies can launch new products. That's why most of the buzz in the tech world gravitates towards software startups, the mobile apps and social networks, which cost little to get off the ground. And yet the garage tinkerers of the world are still at it, and well away from CES’s brightest lights, hundreds of young companies and solo inventors had slotted themselves into the smallest booths at the show to pitch gadgets at potential investors. A portable mini-computer that plugs into docks at your home and office. A 3D-printed iPhone amplifier. A NASA-funded project to develop a computer mouse that could navigate a three-dimensional operating system, if someone would only build one. It was like the platonic ideal of a science fair, with new ideas that didn't need a cakey layer of spin.

My favorite product of the entire show was among the simplest: A clear, cylindrical beach ball–like lamp with flat solar-powered LEDs on one end and a reflective circle on the other that emitted a bright light in all directions. It could be deflated and stored for weeks without the charge running down, and had been made for African countries where Vegas' electric bonanza was a fever dream. The light had been on the market for three weeks, and already thousands were selling on Amazon.com every day. "We step in cow doo, I guess," chuckled Joseph Bunevacz, a jovial Hungarian grandfather, whose son runs the business. "I still don't know what we did right."

At the end of my last day, I walked over to The Verge's trailer on the vast parking lot in front of the convention center to find editor Josh Topolsky, whose two-year-old website had done some of the most thoughtful writing on tech culture (and frenetic wall-to-wall gadget reviews, too). After more than a week running his ship, Topolsky's thoughts dribbled out at undisciplined length, and he sounded surprised at how good he felt about a show that many had left for dead.

"Just like the world, most of the stuff is bad," he said, over an abandoned spread of cookies and cheese. "But I think there are cracks in the pavement, and there are flowers that bloom in the cracks, and if you're just seeing the sidewalk, you're missing the really important stuff…Haters are always, shit sucks, everything's over, life is boring, there's never anything new. And I feel like, you're bored because you don't know where to look."