AIR1 v AIR2 v Spark

[IanG-UK]

One of my prime reasons for buying a D-Premier, and then two, was the promise from Devialet that a Mac source would connect wirelessly to the router and wirelessly to the D-Premier. And would work. Single source. No wires. Few boxes. Perfect! (Maybe)

"AIR1"
This was delivered, in theory, when Devialet installed the wifi board in the D-Premier (in early 2012, I think), though users struggled with connectivity, allegedly because of lack of knowledge of wifi networks and routers/channels/buffers. At the time, these were seemingly the weaknesses of the AIR ("AIR1") system as implemented by users (according to Devialet) which, in its original guise, was wireless only and was Mac only and (I think) was driven by taking binary data from the music file on the Mac - with the decoding and clocking happening in the D-Premier.

"AIR2"
The D-Premier then became the 240 (etc, and now the Expert) in around May 2013; equipped with ethernet as well as wifi for AIR ("AIR2") and became Mac and PC compatible and driven by emulating a sound card device local to the computer - with the sound card having to emulate the clock in the Expert.

When it fails to do so with sufficient accuracy, the result from both PCs and Macs is what is generally termed "white noise".

Since then, plenty of AIR users have been plagued by this "white noise" problem. Our own surveys on this were based on small, and self selecting, sample sizes but showed white noise incidence for between 45% and 80% of users. There are no figures released by Devialet themselves as to the incidence level.

"Spark"
Now we have Spark for Phantom - and I understand that this reverts to taking binary data from the music file (in the Mac or the PC) - with the decoding and clocking happening in the Phantom. I have had no white noise incidence through this system and have not found any posts from others citing this as an issue. (So why not use it within Expert or revert to AIR1, or both?)

Spark/Dialog/Phantom was released in December 2014. It is not entirely wireless: as I understand it there has to be an ethernet connection from source to Dialog and, whilst the connection from Dialog to Phantom appears to be wireless, I understand the transmission uses the best of wifi 2.4 and wifi 5.0 and powerplug, as selected automatically.

Question:
Does anyone know why, given that the AIR2 problem appears pretty much insoluble, there appears to be such a problem in speedily making Expert compatible with Dialog? Spark has been around nine months now and yet Devialet still has no ETA for Dialog/Expert delivery.

I've had some success in getting updates from Devialet (always polite, often very slow) but, as is their style, they are understandably very reluctant to admit failure from any of their product elements with the default words "we are working on it" appearing more times than I care to recall.