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Who cares what these guys think.
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I wouldn't get too frustrated about a review written by some blokes who wouldn't know a high end system if they tripped over it. Just enjoy the music. You're missing nothing.
Lifetime Roon, Mac mini, int. SSD, ext. HDD, tv as monitor, key board and track pad on bean bag as remote,Devialet 200, Od'A #097, Blue jeans speaker cable,
Dynaudio C1 MkII.
Jim Smith's GBS.
Northern NSW Australia.
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It's another review reflecting the slightly confusing marketing. I look forward to more reviews from serious hifi publications, especially using a pair of phantoms with dialog.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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I do think it is up to Devialet to equip their reviewers with the pertinent facts in order to have the best chance of getting a positive review. If they are going to send a $2K product, it may be worth it to spend another bit of $ in customer support time to educate the reviewer to avoid reviews like this. (i.e. not knowing that bluetooh works right out of box.)
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And if you're comparing to bluetooth speakers, would be nice to know what A2DP codec the connection was using.
Phantoms are equipped with CSR bluetooth chips, which means they fully support aptX (CSR was the owner of aptX before selling to Qualcomm), the codec which provides almost-lossless 44/16 audio experience over bluetooth.
Apple mobile devices sadly do not implement it, so they're limited to lossy A2DP codec.
Some Android phones support aptX. Mac OS X starting with Lion support aptX well also. You can check on Mac OS X if it's using aptX by holding "option" key while clicking on the bluetooth icon in the top bar, and moving mouse pointer to Phantom. It will show the codec right there.
In any case, aptX is not true lossless 44/16 (although it comes near) - it divides the 22khz range (=44KHz Nyquist sampling rate) into 5.5KHz subbands (=11KHz sampling rate each), and codes each frequency subband using ADPCM which is well-suited for "smooth" signal with little variation. It then allocates more bits to lower subbands and less to higher, because generally there's much less variance in higher frequencies. Standard allocation is 8bits 0-5.5KHz, 4bits for 5.5KHz-11KHz, 2bits for 11-16.5KHz, 2bits for 16.5-22KHz, altogether 16bits, at 11KHz "sampling" rate (because each subband is 0-5.5KHz) = 352Kbit/s compared to 1.4Mbit/s PCM rate of 44/16 signal.
These are all bits of ADPCM coded data, so not comparable to PCM bits, as ADPCM losslessly takes much less space than PCM on average.
Bottom line - aptX is the closest you can get to PCM in bluetooth, and it's important to know if it was used while evaluation: most "bluetooth speakers" don't bother implementing aptX as they know that sound quality is limited by speaker itself.
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why are you waiting for any review (unless you don't own Phantoms), what has to be "justified" ? Don't you believe your own ears ?
Spark...yes, that's from the time someone started to develop that kind of software ! Did they ever looked at other software ?
And, until now, Devialet seems to be busy with bug-fixes only...
But, if necessary, I use (pre-)streamer software with a better user-interface.
Soundwise Spark is OK, as a result of that, I'm happy with my Dialog/Phantoms !
