Auralic Aries

[GuillaumeB]

Open source and 3rd party developers are great as long as they continue to develop decent software and continue to support their products. The Linn experience has been quite interesting in this regard. Originally their approach was to go completely open source but the result was that they lost control of the CP experience since many apps were unreliable and didn't work well. Many consumers got fed up and this reflected badly on Linn. A number of 3rd party developers had jumped into the market and developed apps (some better than others) but didn't always bother to support the products beyond a certain point (which was a problem since Linn regularly updated the firmware of their streamers). I suppose this is why a number of manufacturers have now taken control of the user experience - for e.g. Lumin, Auralic, Linn etc. It's rumoured that Linn's new CP platform Kazoo went way over budget and only just went live a week ago after almost a couple of years of development. I understand it's still very buggy. I expect Lightning DS will take time to become fully functional and stable. I don't think we should underestimate the amount of work required.

We are talking about different thing. Where you are talking about relying on 3rd part software I'm talking about allowing 3rd party software.

A possibility to get something is way better than the option to not get anything at all. Take Moon 180D for example. You can use it with almost any UPnP software, but if that wasn't the case what would be the options? As far as I see it, the only option would be to use the crappy iOS software. No OsX app, no Windows app, no Linux app, no BSD app, no Android app, no Windows Phone app no nothing. Just the app for iOS that ain't so goo and in fact stopped working "properly" when iOS update arrived. Yay for that. A streamer only for Apple mobile device owners, who don't upgrade their OS.

A lot of Linn users on Android happen to use BubbleDS, not developed by Linn, btw.

So if Devialet did go down the UPnP route (big if!) it would be interesting to see what kind of resources they would throw at this. Would they be happy depending on 3rd party apps? I somehow doubt it. They seem to have more than enough on their plates at the moment with AIR, SAM etc. No doubt the DSD development effort is taking up lots of internal resources too.

No, they should not depend on 3rd party apps, but they should allow them. Unless, of course, they plan on supporting all the available platform themselves. I could live with that as well, but as it would require a lot of development effort, well it's like you said.

If I were in their shoes (which I'm not!) I would white label Streaming Unlimited. But then we have the question of whether the Devialet unit can technically actually do UPnP. Where would the processing for this sit? In the AIR chip?

I'd be really surprised if Devialet couldn't do UPnP. Even RasberryPi and way inferior hardware can do UPnP. Actually Devialet does all the thing needed for UPnP already, but not in UPnP related contexts.

Still, I think Devialet should opt for OpenHome as it extends UPnP/DLNA somewhat.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I cannot imagine Devialet will enable UPnP without bringing out a robust control point of their own. And I think this is quite a substantial undertaking, based on the experience of all the other manufacturers in this field. I therefore don't see this as too likely.

Guillaume