Phantoms delivered this afternoon

[thumb5]

The point of my reference to Sonos was that on release it worked. It's true that it's been updated since, but the Sonos user experience today is really not much different from how it was when I first used it 10 years ago. In all that time I think Sonos have only messed up once: the 2nd generation touchscreen controllers were very unreliable. Otherwise it's been consistently excellent. 

Completely agreed.  As I understand it, the recent batch of complaints about the phone/tablet controller software is mostly to do with UI design, rather than reliability.  I pretty much always use the old-fashioned first-generation dedicated controllers, which are rock solid, so it's not something that's bothered me at all.

Is it really the case that designing robust music server software is much more difficult today than it was back then?

I can't see any reason why it should be.  If anything it should be easier to build software to meet a given set of requirements now than it was ten years ago (or whenever) because the tools are better and the hardware is so much more powerful.  But first of all you have to have a well-defined and stable set of requirements.  Given that Devialet didn't seem to know exactly what Spark was going to support until such a short time before it was released, that rang a big alarm bell for me.  Also, it still takes time to properly test and debug device software, and it looks as though that was done rather hurriedly in order to meet shipping dates.  (In common with lots of other software for devices that are field-upgradeable, I might add.)