AIR1 v AIR2 v Spark

[Jean-Marie]

The main problem with AIR 1 was the way it was interacting with iTunes.
It was using apple events, but it was not something that was vetted by Apple and therefore there was no guarantee that it would continue to work over time. If you remember during the lifetime of AIR 1, one iTunes update had already triggered that situation.
I agree that 'shipping the file' as AIR1 was doing is the most satisfactory because it eliminate every thing SQ wise before the Devialet itself.
This is certainly how Spark is working, with the difference being that Spark also provides the UI, with all the pluses and minuses.

I don't know if the interaction between the dialog and an expert will be true an audio stream sent over USB, therefore requiring no software update of the expert or if they will be using something else. (My guess is it will be a standard audio stream, but my crustal ball has been prone wrong at least 50% of the time.)
I suspect that supporting the expert line through spark and dialog is harder than phantom because unlike phantom which was green field, the first thing the expert population will do is compare it to their current solutions. And there are many, so I suspect the minimum feature set required for a launch with expert is larger, so I would not be surprised if the USB aspect and interworking with expert was not the gating factor.