Auralic Aries

[Georgethesixth]

This discussion is fascinating. How can it be that people on the one hand spend hard cash trying to exclude every possible interference, and on the other hand ask for non-essential features on a purpose build hardware platform.

I do hope that Devialet will keep a focus on core musical quality, features and stability. There is still some work to do on AIR reliability, feature support (functions of app's need to be available in AIR) and platform support (Linux version ?). If you ask me - which nobody does off course -, 'Me too'-features are only distracting when they are not necessary from a marketing point of view.

So, are you saying that Devialet should focus on the features you want them to focus on, instead of the distracting features you don't care about

The 'SAM-ready' label might also be a smart marketing move if they can get speaker manufacturers so far that they are willing to add the Devialet-label in their marketing.

It could go like that but I doubt it will. Remains to be seen. Someone might even go as far as to say "SAM ready" == "Devialet can use DSP to correct our design flaws" which doesn't really sound that appealing if you don't own a Devialet.

Perhaps What I wanted to say is : I hope they focus on features that are unique to to the platform and not on features that you can add without quality loss from a lot of vendors. To stay on topic : if they should partner with Auralic, they could create a solution that has more value for us as customer, and has a much shorter time to market. This doesn't inhibit Devialet to create their own platform on a later date.

Another reason why I hope that they will focus on improving current features and services, is the fact that there are still flaws that are important to fix. From a technical point of view : the white noise problem when using AIR is not solved yet, although they obviously thought it was.
From a support point of view : although one-on-one support is good, the quality of the public support site is not ok. You find outdated documents without reference to applicable firmware revisions, no list of known problems etc. Even the success of this forum, and the lack of an official Devialet counterpart is troublesome. For me, these are indications of growing pains that need to be tackled before adding new functionality. They have a great example if they look at Sonos : from day one, they made sure that what they delivered worked almost flawless. Problems are openly discussed and fixed in a short time.

I did not look from your point of view to the SAM discussion but IMHO you have a point when you say that SAM might not be attractive for speaker vendors. I did speak from my perspective (and some friends) as an absolute novice : if SAM had existed when I bought our new HiFi set, I would have bought SAM-ready speakers. Why : peace of mind. Is that not the same reason why they will implement DSD ? It is not as if the market is saturated with DSD-recordings. Why do people want it ? If they pay good money for amplifier- and DAC functionality, they want to have a solution that might not be obsolete in a couple of months.