Devialet Chat

Very interesting and positive review - thanks for posting.

Thanks. Not often we see full in-room measurements on these.

Mitchco is indeed very positive about Phantoms. His only real criticisms are frequency balance and lack of time alignment. The original white Phantom had a fabulous (nothing less!) in-room frequency response in my listening room. I'll add a measurement taken at the listening position with Audiolense (2016). You can see the rather nasty main standing wave at just under 50Hz and it's double at around 92Hz. Also some other irregularities up to 900Hz. But the general response from 10Hz (!) to over 20kHz is textbook with 20kHz some 10dB lower in level than 40Hz. The original Phantom did not have bass and treble exaggerated like Golds have. The tweeter in Gold is probably better than the one in Classic Phantom, but it is also a little too loud.
Audiolense dealt nicely with the uneven room response and I had a nice trial of Phantoms.

I've updated the image to show a simulation of the correction Audiolense did.

[attachment=4349]

Just to clarify that I'm not trying to bash Golds here. If I bought Phantoms today I'd buy Golds. Audiolense would help me adapting them to my room (and my preferences) anyway. Main reason I haven't bought them yet is lack of RAAT support. When Devialet decides to deliver RAAT I might line up..

Thanks... What is RAAT?

(23-Oct-2020, 23:17)The Knife Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks... What is RAAT?

https://kb.roonlabs.com/RAAT

It is supposed to give the best SQ when connecting to a Roon server.  Phantom owners can, today, connect to Roon via Airplay or optical and are hoping that it can become Roon certified when RAAT is implemented.  Note that there are some Expert Pro users who prefer Airplay to RAAT.

Personally, I trialed Roon but did not find it compelling enough.  Plus, later discovered that Roon SQ can sometimes be poorer than using a native App,

True, RAAT may not always be the best. I used Devialet AIR for a long time with the 250 Pro I had, but switched to RAAT after some time and preferred it in my system. We won't know how RAAT in Phantoms perform until Devialet delivers. It is of course possible to use UPnP, but I've heard that Phantoms has a "temperamental" UPnP so I'm just waiting...

(24-Oct-2020, 08:33)ogs Wrote: [ -> ]It is of course possible to use UPnP, but I've heard that Phantoms has a "temperamental" UPnP so I'm just waiting...

Temperamental? UPnP was rock solid for me paired with MinimServer, and provided the best sound quality. Better than Airplay, optical

Yes, but I use Roon (lifetime subscriber) so for me it would have to be one of the squeezebox-UPnP bridge solutions. None of which are stable with Phantom UPnP. I know MinimServer and Audirvana (among others) work with Phantoms but none of the Minim controllers are good in my view and Audirvana cost money + is either Mac or Win. I'd prefer Linux...