Mac AIR v MiND 180 v Auralic ARIES v totaldac d1 server

[PhilP]

Hi Guillaume,
my understanding was that at the very beginning Air was conceived as an ideal engineering solution where the Devialet was the master. I was told by one of their engineers that Air made Amarra, Audirvans, Pure Music etc. redundant. My guess is that many customers wanted to use existing software they had chosen with other systems and did not like to be "told what to do".
So v1 Air was an engineering optimised solution, still having some teething troubles admittedly, and Air v2 is a complete rewrite, probably instigated by marketing feedback, to act like a sound card so -any- audio software will send a wireless signal to the Devialet.
It would not surprise me to find that the only thing Air v1 and Air v2 have in common is the word "Air".
As Thierry alludes, the original way was probably the best way for SQ, but did not match the wishes of too many of the customers.

It's not at all clear to me how AIR v2 works with players like Audirvana Plus i.e. what AIR does and what A+ does. Several of us have not been able to enable parameters in A+ like Exclusive Mode, Direct Mode and Integer Mode and thus have not been able to take full advantage of the features that A+ without AIR offers. It seems likely that AIR is preventing this and it may still be the case that AIR v2 acts as the 'Master' and takes advantage of features such as Integer Mode itself - I really don't know.

There do appear to be some differences in sound between AIR on its own and AIR with A+ but perhaps A+ is modifying the sound before the signal is passed to AIR - again, I don't know. What I do know is that I am happy with the sound and flexibility that I get from using AIR Wi-Fi and I have never had a drop-out even when streaming 24-bit.

I am, however, intrigued to hear the improvements that the totaldac d1 server can bring