I just want to have a good old moan about Devialet

[Confused]

...
Having said that, we need to get real. When Mathieu Pernot (Devialet Expert head engineer) attended Oxford Audio Consultants on 17th July last year, he presented as a very demoralised company employee and I suspected he was sympathetic to some of the challenges about the Expert range he received, albeit he had to keep to the company line. He did however reveal that the Expert line was not selling world wide in the numbers needed for good company profit and made a comparison with large volumes of Phantom  sales. I cannot recall the figures he quoted but what he said made it clear to me that the Expert range would not be a priority. Ian @thumb5 was our scribe at that meet and I’ve checked his report which centred on a set of questions asked on this forum. It maybe that he recorded the statistics Mathieu gave at that event and can explain in more statistical detail. I hope so, because what Mathieu said made it very clear to me where Devialet’s priority will lie. If the Expert range does not turn the profit their other products do, no wonder all is quiet on the Expert upgrade/bug fixing/development/communication front.

@Greg: the figures I think you're searching for are in @Confused's post following the event:

One interesting statistic came up in conversation, apparently there are about 7000 Expert amps sold, the Phantom & Reactor range is now heading over 100,000 units and counting.  Also consider that the Expert is the older product and hence has been available longer.

Yes, I recall Mathieu quoting the figures, however, I do not recall that this was in the context of the Expert not selling or not being profitable.  I might be wrong, and I was not the only one there, so I would be interested in if anyone else can remember what was said, or at least the general context of the conversation.  From what I recall the conversation was more centered around support and allocation of recourses for software development, the Phantoms have the larger user base, so will get priority over limited resources.  As I said, it was a while ago now, so I might be wrong, and I would be interested if anyone else can recall. 

Where I absolutely agree with Greg is that Mathieu did indeed present as a demoralised company employee, this was very apparent.

Putting a positive spin on the numbers, I can see that there is a kind of symbiotic relationship between the Expert and the Phantom.  Without development of the original ADH for the D-Premier, there would be no Phantom.  Without the Development of the Phantom, we would not have SAM on the current Expert range, and so on.  So for me this is why getting the Phantoms and Expert both on the same OS makes complete sense.  Looking forward, there could even be some benefits from the move into car audio, such as DSP systems for cars morphing into room correction for the Phantom and Expert.  Overly optimistic perhaps, but not impossible.

As a complete aside, I was flicking through some recent copies of "Hifi News and Record Review" yesterday, and every single issue has a full two page Expert Pro advert, going back many months.  So Devialet are spending some money advertising.  This certainly does not give the impression that the Expert has been abandoned, as some are suggesting.  Although we could speculate that they are advertising because they are not selling just as easily as it would be to speculate that Devialet are advertising the Expert because it is so profitable, who knows?  (if you are vey cynical, you might wonder if a Devialet review will be appearing soon)

It now occurs to me that this post is very off topic because I have not moaned yet.  So back to the moaning.  Traffic was bad this morning, really very bad indeed, it's raining too, miserable.  I also note that there have been some excellent posts earlier in the thread by people moaning about all the moaning about Devialet on this forum.  Fair points, and fully on topic for this thread.  What I would say to them is that this is where this thread can be useful, if there are any off topic or gratuitous moaning posts elsewhere on the forum, we just need to direct them to this thread for further discussion here.  Then, the rest of the forum should ne reasonably moan free, for those that just want to discuss music, equipment, system tweaking, tips etc.  And for those that do actually want to have a good moan, then this thread offers an oasis of joy.

(note to self, trying to keep internet forums somehow organised and on topic is a fools game, you are an idiot, it will never work)