An update. After trying many things, the firmware 8.1.2 / SAM / Blades combo still sounded dreadful. In essence, there appears to be a massive increase in the very lowest bass, it does not sound good at all. This gave me a thought (it happens occasionally). The Blade 2 is SAM V8 designated, which I believe means it has been SAM'd with SAM lab for SAM V2. So as an experiment, I tried running the Blade 2 SAM profile. With 8.1.2, the Blade 2 SAM profile actually sounded far better than using the "correct" original Blade profile. In search for further information, I thought I would then try the new KEF Reference 5 profile. This is obviously a traditional "box" style speaker, but does have the same number and type of bass driver as the Blade, essentially the Ref is a box style trickle down development of the Blade. The reference 5 profile also sounded massively better with 8.1.2 than the "correct" original Blade SAM profile. I'll do a bit more listening tomorrow, but it looks like there is something very amiss with the Blade SAM profile. I have posted previously that I really liked SAM with the Blades (on 7.x.x firmware), but one downside was that with some tracks there appeared to be a little too much ultra low bass grunge. I'd put this down to the fact that any speaker that could effectively run flat frequency response to sub bass levels would have some issues like this. I'm not so sure now, I beginning to think the original Blade SAM profile is defective somewhere, and now with SAM 2 this has gone from a minor issue and manifested itself into something quite horrible. Clearly, if you can swap the exact SAM profile for one which is merely a close approximation, and get a massive improvement, well, something is badly wrong somewhere. I wonder if the Blade is the only speaker to suffer this?
My ever helpful dealer (Oxford Audio) has offered to set up their own demo Blades next week with 8.1.2 SAM V2 new week, just to check the issue is repeatable. Assuming they find the same this should add a little clout with any forthcoming dealings I have with Devialet regarding this issue. (Which goes to show that there are some very decent Devialet dealers out there - thanks guys!)
My ever helpful dealer (Oxford Audio) has offered to set up their own demo Blades next week with 8.1.2 SAM V2 new week, just to check the issue is repeatable. Assuming they find the same this should add a little clout with any forthcoming dealings I have with Devialet regarding this issue. (Which goes to show that there are some very decent Devialet dealers out there - thanks guys!)
