Evidence Devialet hasn't completely given up on the Expert Pro line

[Gerronwithit]

The reason I bought the first half of my Expert over 5 years ago, apart from the quality of the sound, which is still exceptional, was the introduction of the CI board that promised a bright future for this product. Additionally, its highly configurable Swiss Army knife qualities meant it fitted easily into my AV setup without lots of additional products ie boxes.

The engineering of this product was, and still is stunning but the software development is woeful as evinced by the obsolete SD card requiring almost programming skills to be of any use whatsoever. Why, oh why they could not embed the very limited amount of code as well as engineering into this product to fully automate its Swiss Army knife qualities is beyond me. The batch update to safeguard the configuration file after you have wrestled it / them out of the back of the machine, tortuously updated the card(s), put them back in the right order then checked the configuration out on the system, is a dinosaurian disgrace.

No orphan has had as much neglect as the Expert Pro.

It had the SD card system when you bought it. If it’s that bad, why did you?

If you reread my post, you will see I praised its Swiss Army qualities ie its flexible configurability. Its sound quality is still amazing and it packs an awful lot of punch into a very glamorous package. I bought it for those reasons and my need to have it integrate into my AV room and system. Its footprint and beauty helped sell it to my wife. At that time, if they didn’t heed so many boxes I probably would have bought Naim. 

Now, I am not as fully flexible as a Swiss Army knife so having to clamber behind an enormously immovable HiFi table which currently contains my 65” television, my Denon AV amp, a Marantz DVD player, my Virgin media box, a telephone, a router and various other devices is not a trivial matter to extract two fiddly SD cards. The table is also tightly flanked by the 803 D3s. Then having to insert these into a PC to download or update the configurations is a very bad joke. You do not even know you have done this propely until you reinsert that cards into the boxes and fire it up. 

I’d rather do it from a sedentary position with the ability to instantly test any configuration changes or downloads I make. Even you, Pim, must see the incongruity of all the flexibility offered by the Export Pro compromised by these cards. As it happens, I have not touched them since I upgraded to the 1000 as the temptation to do so does not exist. Anyway, I bought the CI version because it was going to deliver so much upgrade flexibility and future proofing and Devialet has promptly done absolutely nothing to fulfil that promise.