Auralic Aries

[GuillaumeB]

Am I right in thinking that the Lumin IOS app would work with the Aries? I believe it's built on the same Openhome UPnP standard.

Yes

Sadly the MiND is based on a different implementation of UPnP and therefore Kinsky, Lumin etc won't work with it.

But Lightning will and does work with "pure" UPnP/DLNA devices.

If Devialet do implement UPnP then I really hope they piggy back on something that is already out there, open source or not. Even the Streaming Unlimited platform would be good (used by lots of companies including dCS, ARC and Krell). But I have my doubts...

I, on the other hand, am hoping for an open source solution so that 3rd party developers are free to create their own controllers and a support will easily be available to all platforms.

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.

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.

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? Or will we be sending our units back for another hardware upgrade?

Guillaume