Devialet partner with the carmaker Renault

[Jean-Marie]

This was one of my biggest concerns regarding the Devialet earlier. Many of us saw what happened to Expert's development when they were working on the Phantom concept. They didn't even seem to fix bugs on Expert anymore, not to mention introducing new innovations. Eventually they released the 'Pro' which proves that they definitely do improvements to the existing products, although it may come with a hefty price tag.

I'm more worried about product quality nowadays. There are software bugs which take very long for them to fix. For example I have many open tickets in the support and one of those is already one year old without any solution. I'm sure that I'm not the only one. It makes me wonder if they have they outsourced their software development completely. Whatever it is, there is definitely room for improvement.

Secondly, customers have been asking for a digital room correction feature (and many other features) for years but nothing really has happened. Actually it's very hard to say whether Devialet cares about customer feedback or not because they don't communicate with us. They are quite unpredictable regarding new features. To me it looks like that they are mainly focusing on bringing their core technologies to more affordable products and partnerships so that their mission "someday everyone will own a Devialet" comes true. I am totally fine with this if, and only if, they are willing to take a good care of their existing customers and provide improvements regularly.

I think this is forgetting SAM, which is a very significant feature in my opinion, that was inherited from the development of the phantom and delivered to the experts for free, even before anyone had heard about the phantoms. 

I sure would all like to our pet peeves to be fulfilled and can always wonder and complain that they are diverting resources from where we would like to, but not sure it would be for the best. 

Once again, beyond ADH, SAM has turned to be for me the most significant feature from a SQ perspective, and if we are honest no one was asking for it nor even thinking of it. 

So I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than as presented above. 

Jean-Marie

Very good point Jean-Marie regarding the SAM. It's a good concept and it does improve SQ. Currently it works below 300 Hz so hopefully someday they will do full bandwidth correction. Until that day comes, I'm happily using convolution that improves SQ even more.

Even if there were a full bandwidth SAM, I don't think it would replace convolution for people who are using it.
From what I understand, SAM concentrates on 'making the speakers ideal' without taking into account the acoustic environment while convolution takes into account the environment. I'm not a specialist, but my understanding of the effect of SAM cannot be achieved by convolution, so for people wanting to correct the acoustic environment, I think the ideal would be SAM + convolution or any other form of correction.

My two cents,
Jean-Marie
PS: By the way, I may be wrong, but I think that the phase correction part of SAM is full bandwidth. Only the acceleration correction of the woofer(s) is bandwidth limited under 300Hz.