Air & Devialet memory (technical)

[Jean-Marie]

But then to operate otherwise, Devialet has to steer away from the virtual sound card approach which is by design forced to rely on small packets that simply stream what is playing on the source to a standalone app that is aware of what is being played to be able to buffer it in one go or on fewer but larger packets which will also requires a different hardware architecture in terms of internal buffer memory


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Air version 1 was Mac/iTunes only and once de-bugged worked brilliantly. Apparently too many potential customers were anti iTunes, or Mac or both and it was completely re-written as version 2, which only shares the name not the concept, is universal and has not been satisfactorily de-bugged yet.
Very much not a case of "the customer is always right" IMO!

OTOH sending data down a wireless network is what wifi does and the idea that "common sense says it won't work" is technically ridiculous. Sorry.

While I agree that the way Air v1 was handling music was more satisfactory from an intellectual standpoint it was having a certain number of short comings amongst others:
1) Not being able to play protected files
2) Relying on a iTunes trick to keep track of what was playing and adjusting accordingly which was sometimes having some hiccups
3) The iTunes trick was not guarantied to work from version to version
4) streaming playing capabilities were limited to the internet radios (or the streams) that iTunes could play

Bottom line is that the virtual sound card, although certainly more difficult to make work correctly (and it is amusing to see that the Windows bug is not so far away from the Mac OS X bug that is also causing problem to air) is more generic.

I suspect, without having any proof point, that eventually Devialet may want to offer two alternate routes: 

1. The Virtual Card / Air: offering the maximum flexibility in terms of software playing and source etc... meaning that they delegate everything before the Air driven to non Devialet
   
2. The Dialog route where everything is under the Control and Responsibility of Devialet.
   

Jean-Marie