Last minute Summer Devialet Event at OAC with Mathieu Pernot! 12 July 2018

[brit]

A BIG thanks to @thumb5 for his very comprehensive reports and @Confused for his very helpful "supplementary". I too was at the event and can echo all that was said about the contribution made by both Joachim and Mathieu - they were both very open and honest about what was happening at Devialet ,and the mistakes of the past, my hat off to them. I too felt very positive about the future with Devialet, and came away from the event much happier. I can not add anything to what has already been reported so comprehensively, so repeat my thanks to @thumb5 and @Confused. Thanks also to the guys at OAC  for running yet another very useful, and helpful event.


David

[IanG-UK]

Great write-ups from Ian and the Confused one - Ian must have studied shorthand in his spare time as I can’t think of a single thing missed.

Thanks to Jon and the team for staging such a good event - as always, done really well. And thanks to Alexandre and Joachim and Mathieu for a comprehensive and interactive presentation which does seem to show that their freedom to act is not restrained as it was in the past, most probably by ineffective leadership.

The core presentation was consistent with what was said at Munich but with more detail, recognising that they have had more time to prepare things and work together as a team. They do seem to have got the message about not over promising and under delivering - which was one of the core failings in the past.

A splendid event.

[ogs]

Thanks a lot @thumb5 I hope you also had time to enjoy the event in between all the questions and answers! Also thanks to @Confused for his additional comments.

Seems we have a definitive solution to the latency problem for Phantoms. Did Joachim elaborate what the 'Phantom app' (not Spark) is? I've looked at Devialet's web, but can not find any references. Lack of volume control on Phantoms in this mode could be a problem in a home set up though. This is obviously geared towards installations and the 'Dante dongle' where volume control is done on the Dante feed.
I must admit I am disappointed that convolution is not coming. It is maybe too complex to translate a long convolution filter to the necessary instructions needed for the DSP processors on the old expert amps although it should be possible to do this in a simpler way on the CI, at least for inputs handled by the CI. Eight PEQ entries per channel is still a good help so I'll probably try that at some point.

Again, thanks for the report.

[NickB]

Yes it was a good event and many thanks to Jon, Alasdair, Dan from OAC and Alexandre, Joachim and Mathieu from Devialet. There was a really positive energy coming from the whole Devialet team and it seems that they are now free to do what they know they should have been doing for some time.

Have to say that my dealings with Mathieu over the last fortnight have been great, had a problem with my speakers and the 1000Pro which came down to it seems and impedence problem in the extreme high frequency. Mathieu offered me a tailored set of ADH which he said may take a couple of days, I got them in 3 hours and they worked perfectly, thats service........

Its very difficult to give a proper view on the Magico A3 as they had only been running for an hour before the event and from personal experience they take a lot of running in, mine taking more than a year at my listening regime. They are instantly recognisable as Magico so if you like the Magico sound you will like them. They are very clean and clear with pinpoint accuracy and extremely well controlled bass, which for small speakers (compared to my S5's) is very deep. the other thing to note is they need a lot of driving, the 210 that was driving them needed to be at -5 dB to get a good sound level. If you are at all interested in them have a listen, if you can break Alasdiar's grip on them you may even be able to get a home dem (good luck with that)

It was a great day and good to meet up with so many from this Forum and previous OAC events.

[thumb5]

...
Seems we have a definitive solution to the latency problem for Phantoms. Did Joachim elaborate what the  'Phantom app'  (not Spark) is? I've looked at Devialet's web, but can not find any references.

Sorry @ogs, my ignorance of the Phantom meant I assumed that the Phantom app Joachim referred to was something everyone would be familiar with.  He certainly didn't make a big deal of it.  Maybe Devialet customer support can suggest how to get a copy.

[Axel]

...
Seems we have a definitive solution to the latency problem for Phantoms. Did Joachim elaborate what the  'Phantom app'  (not Spark) is? I've looked at Devialet's web, but can not find any references.

Sorry @ogs, my ignorance of the Phantom meant I assumed that the Phantom app Joachim referred to was something everyone would be familiar with.  He certainly didn't make a big deal of it.  Maybe Devialet customer support can suggest how to get a copy.

Could he be referring to the Devialet Phantom Remote app that is available on the Apple App Store? It has both the night and mute buttons.

[ogs]

Ah, that may be it. I only have Android devices so if this is iOS only that explains why I have not seen it.

EDIT: yes. I asked a colleague with an iPhone to check the App Store. The Phantom remote is there...

[SteveO...]

Thanks to OAC for running the event and to the attendees for reporting. It'a helped me feel a little positivity about the future of the Export line.

I get the business case for trying to move us onto the new platform - but I'm still waiting for a reason to make it worthwhile to me, and that reason would be Room Correction. I switched to Roon so I could do this and it's made an enormous difference to my listening. I would love to be able to move this into the amplifier so I could gain the benefits on all inputs. I don't buy the technical reasons for its absence; if the platform can do SAM it can do RC, at least over the same frequency range. While it's good to hear they're working on Roon integration, it shows they've paid some attention to their customers' needs, RC would be the killer feature that would allow me to justify the expense of upgrading to Pro/CI.

[thumb5]

The picture I got was that it was mainly a business decision that Devialet don't want to get into room analysis, rather than a technical limitation of the Expert DSP (not being able to handle room correction).  That said, I do feel this is a bit of a half-hearted answer: in principle I'd have thought Devialet could partner with any of several well-known third parties that specialise in room analysis, and work out a way to import the room-specific correction algorithm -- convolution, filters, whatever -- into the Expert DSP engine.  Of course it all comes down to resources, priorities, and whether there would be "any money in it" (to put it crudely).

[Confused]

I have remembered another point that was made during one of the side meetings after the main talk.  This was relating to Devialet's initiative to provide fully active, speaker specific systems.  I was told that Devialet are currently in discussion with a number of speaker manufacturers regarding bespoke active amplification.  How this was explained to me was that speaker crossovers can only subtract from the signal, if the crossover function is performed by the Devialet, it can add, subtract, correct phase and so on.  So Devialet would liaise with the speaker manufacturer, establish from them the perfect "digital" version of the crossover for a given speaker, this is then programmed into a number of Devialet's to produce an active system.  I asked if this was one of the reasons behind the new 210 Pro dual mono, so tho provide a lower cost dual mono that might be used for tweeter duties in an active set-up.  Apparently this is not the case, with one issue at the moment being that the different model types cannot be "chained", so you cannot chain a 1000 Pro with a 440 Pro, for example.  This is why the Vivid set-up at Munich had 1000 Pro's with a D250 on tweeter duty.  In theory, using a 440Pro for the HF would be better, having more power and the benefit of dual mono, lower distortion etc.  

It was not mentioned which manufacturers they are talking to, other than Vivid as we already know, and KEF was also mentioned, but this is only because Joachim knows that I run the KEF Blade.  Apparently KEF are positive about this initiative.

Sounds very interesting, it also sounds very expensive!

Also, there have been a few posts about room correction.  Mathieu did make one comment about RC that has not been mentioned, it was something along the lines of if Devialet were to do room correction it would be a complete system.  So it looks to me that there is some concern about the wide variety of ways that convolutions could be  supplied, but a closed all Devialet system might work.  I am not an expert on the inner working of RC, but combined with ADH I can see some issued with how headroom is dealt with, how changes in sample rates are dealt with, how RC interacts with SAM, this kind of thing.  As stated by Ian earlier, it is clear that RC is not on the short term road map, but I came away with the impression that a complete Devialet RC system might be a possibility in the future.  But don't hold your breath, as the saying goes....