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New firmware 8.1.3
(18-Nov-2015, 21:17)jjo Wrote: …... AIR would probably break and become unusable with the next operating system upgrade after Devialet was gone.

I suppose that depends on your perspective and how lucky you've been….

Air is already broken and unusable in my setup on OSX.  In fact, I've never had the luxury of seeing it working. Wink

>>> 1st Place Award: Devialet, last decades most disappointing technology purchase.  <<<

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(18-Nov-2015, 21:17)jjo Wrote:
(17-Nov-2015, 17:25)Antoine Wrote: If only it was that simple... Dialog and Expert are entirely different architectures. There's a general purpose CPU presumably running Linux inside a Dialog but FPGA's inside the Experts. Worlds apart!

uPnP is an evolutionary step back compared to AIR. But of course at least one of these streaming solutions should be made stable. Doing nothing is (should be) no option for Devialet.

Luckily since the early seventies the problem of different architectures has been solved with a "higher" level programming languages that use compilers to generate architecture specific apps form source code, so that the same code has been usable on many different platforms. I'm sure Devialet does not use lower level languages than C except for drivers and such.

Also UPnP is mostly about XML-parsing, networking and playing files. I know Devialet does all of these things already as the configuration files used to be XML before they switched to JSON.

As for the evolutionary step, I have to disagree. I think that proprietary and platform specific solutions should mostly be a thing of the past and open standards should be embraced.

AIR will always break with the introduction of a new operating system and the operating system support is totally in the hands of Devialet. For example Linux support is totally missing. Supporting every platform separately and keeping up the development with each platform takes time and money.

Making Devialet an UPnP rendered (actually the Linn OpenHome would be even better) would mean that it would work with all the platforms supporting UPnP. They would also work even if the operating system was upgraded since nothing requires operating system level support. How cool is that. If some platform didn't support UPnP, a third party developer could add the support quite easily. With AIR adding the support would require reverse engineering the AIR protocol every time it changes, and for such a small number of users there might not be many willing to do that. Not to mention it might be considered illegal in some countries.

UPnP would work even long after Devialet has ceased to exist, AIR would probably break and become unusable with the next operating system upgrade after Devialet was gone.

I agree, code can be ported however we know that there's a powerful general purpose CPU (quad core 1GHz) running in the Dialog, a generous amount of RAM (1GB) and 2GB of storage space in flash memory. I don't know the details but I think it's safe to assume that's much more powerful hardware than that inside the Experts which merely has a FPGA with little/no external RAM and probably limited flash storage. It's also safe to assume Dialog runs some Linux distribution and other open source software running in it. To port the Dialog solution one would have to find a lean Linux distribution that can run on the FPGA using the presumably little amount of memory available, port the uPnP/OH software and all it's dependencies. Again, I don't think it's easy and it might not even be possible. At least I'm very sure it'll not be as easy a you suggest it to be.

Good points about the proprietary nature of AIR vs. the open source uPnP/DLNA/OH solutions and it's limited OS support however for me the evolutionary step back I mentioned for me lies in it's usability properties. The AIR solution provides a much greater amount of flexibility as long as you run it on a system that's supported. Any software that can output sound can use AIR including advanced and powerful room correction software, try that with UPnP. Even gapless playback is a challenge, and before you "protest" yes I know it can be done including routing PC sound output but developing a mature/stable solution that complete, now THAT would be extremely costly.

People do like to run NAS'es so Devialet could consider porting AIR to Linux or specific Qnap/Synology/... versions. I don't think they'd have to support all and any operating systems out there. Also I don't agree that every new OS breaks the AIR functionality, not completely at least and updating their drivers shouldn't require more than some tweaking in most cases.

However I'd prefer Devialet to stick to their core business and do what they're good at. Software, thus far, isn't something they've shown to be good at (to put it mildly). They could also consider licensing streaming technology like Ravenna (for example) which even exeeds AIR in some/most regards and let their supplier worry about operating system support and lifecycle management. They've done exactly that with their USB solution as well (using XMOS/Thesycon) so why not.
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