Core Infinity board

[octaviars]

I really hope Devialet will improve Spark if they plan to use that to control the new OS board, today I would not want to use that as my main control point for music to much problems and not the best GUI......compared to Roon well there is not much to compare

Is Spark really that bad?

It depends on what you are used to but there are and have been lots of problems with Spark control over Phantoms and often if Devialet fixed one problem they created two new ones  it is better now than it was when I bought my Phantom but it still far from perfect.

If you are used to Roon I have a hard time seeing someone cope with how Spark works, looks.....perhaps this will be better over time but I have had my Phantom one year and there are still problems not solved over a whole year. I think Spark is perhaps like other free UPnP apps out there nothing more. As a Roon user I am used to how Roon solves problems and have a official community where answers are answered really fast by the people how designs it far from how Devialet does their work.

[brit]

Deezer, Tidal Qobuz, Bluetooth, Webradios and then three dots... I wonder what the dots are.

Hopefully will reveal Roon, but not implicitely shown .

[marcor]

Right now Roon with AIR works from my imac. It isn't the most elegant solution as the computer need to be switched on and my account need to be the one logged in, so if my wife log to her account, while roon keeps working, AIR gets disconnected. However with all the limitations it does work, I really hope that this new board won't mess it all up.

Marco

[Hifi_swlon]

Deezer, Tidal Qobuz, Bluetooth, Webradios and then three dots... I wonder what the dots are.

Hopefully will reveal Roon, but not implicitely shown .

It explicitly says 'more to be added' including 'some surprises'.

So at least it's not, 'Roon - NON'!

[GuillaumeB]

Just bringing things back over here since the Oct 17 release has been announced.

Beyond all 'audiophile' things and Roon, which are still unknown, I was actually quite pleased to see Airplay. It might be nice to be able to send stuff to it from a mobile (or friends mobiles). It's not something I would have put on my wish list as I wouldn't have wanted to use up a better feature request. But since it's there, it's useful.

Actually I agree re Airplay. I use this quite a bit with my totaldac d1 server. It's very useful as you say. I use it to stream Qobuz from my Mac and (less often) my iPhone. At a party recently I streamed some content from youtube.

Very occasional dropouts, perhaps the Devialet implementation will be better.

Guillaume

[GuillaumeB]

From my point of view, good to see support for Qobuz on the list even though it will obviously be after another wait ("...the following months...").  Presumably the control interface for that will be Spark?

Yes for me Qobuz is probably as important as Roon (seeing as the two won't work together). It's a shame that Qobuz inside another app (for e.g. iPeng, Kazoo) is never quite as easy and intuitive to use and often misses many features, ideally I'd like to use the actual Qobuz app but I don't want to stream from my iPhone if possible. I guess Airplay could provide me with that functionality though. I did ages ago read something somewhere something about Qobuz supporting UPnP which might be a solution to this...

As to UPnP what flavour will this come in? It seems strange that we are getting this after so many years of Devialet repeatedly telling us that it was no good as a networking protocol for audio. It might have been more relevant in the time before Roon came out and perhaps before streaming services became quite as prevalent. To me UPnP and control points cannot be separated and it took Linn literally a decade to get to where they are now with a really nice UI. Will Devialet's UPnP support gapless playback?

Guillaume

[streamy]

In terms of reliability, 'snappiness', gapless play, and playing from various sources Spark is now on a good performance level. No dropouts at all up to 24/192 with a mix of local FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, lossy MP3 and Qobuz lossless and hires streaming on Phantoms with Dialog. Only still problems with Dialogs optical input. So, far I have not found any UPNP system/software with this performance. Roon that follows a different approach has similar performance (as Spark now in ver 1.10.0), but unfortunately not with Tidal at my location, which is the big drawback of Roon in my case. Tidal produces in Roon dropouts, waiting when jumping within tracks, no gapless play when mixed with local files. So I am often back in Spark for Qobuz streaming and playing my local
ly stored favorites.
Very different is usability: Roon is lightyears ahead of Spark in terms of library search, playqueue composition, display and handling of metafiles, transcoding, equalizing, room correction, in short everything that is necessary to prepare listening and acompany listening with enriched data.
It is not foreseable that Spark would catch up to Roon's league ever. Spark has a simple search function, can handle multiroom playback, compile a playqueue,find tracks, albums, and artists by name only, find similar artists, adjust playback volume and that's more or less it.
But Qobuz for me is a must have in terms of SQ and reliability of streaming. A pity Roon is unable to integrate streaming services other than Tidal. Devialet handles with Spark a number of streaming services and most of them well. Most of them also through their own apps, either directly (Spotify) or through BT or Airplay. Unfortunately, Tidal on Spark didn't do well with me.
So, when Devialet PRO goes Spark this is it what can be expected. Let's hope Dialog and he PRO streaming board become Roon Ready. The Dialog UPNP renderer (beta) suffers from the same as any other UPNP system I owned before. UPNP is not fit for purpose nowadays.

[mdconnelly]

Deezer, Tidal Qobuz, Bluetooth, Webradios and then three dots... I wonder what the dots are.

Hopefully will reveal Roon, but not implicitely shown .

It explicitly says 'more to be added' including 'some surprises'.

So at least it's not, 'Roon - NON'!

Somehow, I have to think (want to think?) that whatever Roon is doing with Devialet is different from whatever Devialet will be announcing soon about their OS board.   For Devialet to not adopt Roon RAAT would be a bit of a loss, but I'm hoping that whatever that "Roon/Devialet leak" was all about will ultimately be a big win (if/when they ever get around to telling us just what it is). 

[Hifi_swlon]

I was thinking about Devialets page on their website.

It didn't tell us anything really and they didn't ask us anything.
Finally we're at a classic Devialet style official announcement that tells us barely more but at least it has a Release date and a few more snippets.

So, what was the point of the sneak preview on the website exactly?
All we can hope I suppose is that they actually read the comments, and care. Even a tiny bit.

[brit]

I was thinking about Devialets page on their website.

It didn't tell us anything really and they didn't ask us anything.  
Finally we're at a classic Devialet style official announcement that tells us barely more but at least it has a   Release date and a few more snippets.

So, what was the point of the sneak preview on the website exactly?
All we can hope I suppose is that they actually read the comments, and care. Even a tiny bit.

I notice that they Don't Love Us anymore ! It seems that they have dropped that ridiculous "strap Line".

David