Od'A for sale

[Confused]

While I assume it is not the end of the forum...it is sad to see G’s Od’A go. To me it represents a symbol of a shift in the forum. I find myself reading less because there seems to be less here. For one thing, there is far more Phantom Discussion then there used to be. I have no issues with Phantom whatsoever - I just don’t have one - and don’t want one. I have valued and followed closely G’s comments/tweaks/etc and have noticed far less posting by him recently - so the sale is not a surprise - seems like a fork in the road....

I too am sad to see that Guillaume has sold his Od'A.  I am sure there are many reasons behind the sale, but I am also sure that Devialet's treatment of Od'A buyers and the subsequent lack of sensible communication must have contributed.  Guillaume is a founder of this forum, arguably the founder of this forum, I just hope Devialet are taking note in that the way they treat customers can destroy brand loyalty in even in the most enthusiastic amongst their customer base.

That said, congrats to whoever has bought Guillaumes Od'A, it is not really a second hand item, you have the limited edition copper gold case and being recently upgraded to 1000Pro spec most if the innards are brand new, plus no hassle required sending back for the CI upgrade, this is already done.  There is a canny buyer out there somewhere!

I was most struck by @Dan 's "fork in the road" comment.  In a way, I know exactly what Dan is saying, the posting on this forum is not quite what it used to be and losing Guillaume as 'tweaker in chief' is indeed a negative.  

That said, I think this forum has a key role going forward.  I joined in the early days of this forum when the Expert range was still very new.  After the D-Premier, the Expert range, which offered both higher spec and lower prices lead to a significant increase in sales and interest.  It also gave rise to many problems, the most notable of which was the well reported issues with AIR.  During this time the forum was always a combination of folk complaining about issues, others trying to solve the issues, and those reporting experiments with ancillaries, front end sources, speakers and everything else.  The key point though is that between us we did pretty much establish how to get the best out of an Expert amp, what sources worked well, the differences between USB and AES/EBU inputs are, all this kind of stuff. As a community this can be done far more effectively than trying to work it all out for yourself, and more effectively means faster and cheaper for many individual owners.  The information posted on this forum has on occasion been absolute gold dust.

So what is the key role of this forum looking forward?  Currently much of the posting is about the CI Board 'upgrade' and the associated issues.  OK, you could say this makes this forum nothing but the go to place for a bit of moaning and complaining, but also it has to be true that the sharing of this information can only help to solve these issues.  Plus it serves as feedback to Devialet, I do know that they read this forum even if they do not contribute.  

I also think that when the new CI Board debugging and trouble shooting dies down a bit, we then need the community effort once again to establish how to get the best out of a CI Board equipped Pro.  With the new USB implementation and the Pro's inherent performance difference, I suspect that the answers to this question will be different to that with the Expert.  Plus we still need to answer the question as to how exactly to extract the very best sound quality from the CI Board, there may be many gems yet to be discovered.

So yes, a fork in the road, but my view is that this forum has the potential to be as useful and productive as ever as we progress down the latest section of road.

Many thanks to Guillaume, Rufus and Martyn for keeping the forum alive.