One year after 13.2.0

[David A]

I have no concerns about redundancy or support. I have or had products from Quad, EAR and Leica still fully factory serviceable after more than 50 years.

My concern about support is should the online configurator become no longer available. What do we do then?

There are 3 practical ways around the problem, one far better than the others. Devialet could make a configurator app people could download which would let them run the configuration file generation process on their own computers or make the configurator available to someone who would host it online for users, along with a database of all SAM profiles available. That would definitely be the best solution.

In the absence of that, the second solution is that someone is willing to set up a database where existing users can upload their existing config files with a summary of what their configuration does and others can search that database tottery and  find a file that provides the configuration they want. That will help in some cases but not in every case.

In the absence of either of those options things become difficult and creating a new configuration means that the user will have to edit an existing configuration file in a text editor. It can be done. When I had my CI board installed it was installed by a Devialet engineer who was travelling around Australia doing board updates in dealers premises. When I got my amp home after picking it up, the config file I created did not work and I phoned the engineer at the dealer's shop. He had me email him the config file, noticed that it had been "scrambled" a bit in some way, edited my file to correct the problem and emailed it back to me. The edited file worked perfectly. Files can obviously be edited if you know how to do it and it might be possible to develop a set of instructions for how to edit a configuration file but that won't help for things like SAM profiles because you need to know the details for the profile for your particular speakers. SAM would basically become unusable if you changed speakers.

The default position in the absence of any of the above options is factory configuration. That means single amp mode only, all inputs on at their default settings. Some things like tone controls can be changed and the new settings will stick but other changes like DPM on or off will need to be reset every time you turn the amp on. You lose access to SAM and I don't know what happens with phono settings and how that affects people. Network settings default to DHCP so you can't have a fixed address for the amp. The amp works and is usable but  we lose a lot of the things which make a Devialet the amp it is. I don't use a turntable so I wouldn't miss the phono settings capabilities but I would miss SAM which does make an improvement to the sound I get from my speakers. I don't use a fixed IP address, I use DHCP, so that would not be a problem for me but turning DPM off every time I turn the amp on would become a pain. Others would have different problems. Factory configuration would not be a problem for some but for others it would range from a minor annoyance to a real PITA.

That's my assessment of where we would stand without the online configurator.

I hope Devialet would either create an app we could use on our own computers or at least provide a very complete guide to the creation and editing of config files. After that it comes down to the ingenuity of the user base at the time.