In terms of reliability, 'snappiness', gapless play, and playing from various sources Spark is now on a good performance level. No dropouts at all up to 24/192 with a mix of local FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, lossy MP3 and Qobuz lossless and hires streaming on Phantoms with Dialog. Only still problems with Dialogs optical input. So, far I have not found any UPNP system/software with this performance. Roon that follows a different approach has similar performance (as Spark now in ver 1.10.0), but unfortunately not with Tidal at my location, which is the big drawback of Roon in my case. Tidal produces in Roon dropouts, waiting when jumping within tracks, no gapless play when mixed with local files. So I am often back in Spark for Qobuz streaming and playing my local
ly stored favorites.
Very different is usability: Roon is lightyears ahead of Spark in terms of library search, playqueue composition, display and handling of metafiles, transcoding, equalizing, room correction, in short everything that is necessary to prepare listening and acompany listening with enriched data.
It is not foreseable that Spark would catch up to Roon's league ever. Spark has a simple search function, can handle multiroom playback, compile a playqueue,find tracks, albums, and artists by name only, find similar artists, adjust playback volume and that's more or less it.
But Qobuz for me is a must have in terms of SQ and reliability of streaming. A pity Roon is unable to integrate streaming services other than Tidal. Devialet handles with Spark a number of streaming services and most of them well. Most of them also through their own apps, either directly (Spotify) or through BT or Airplay. Unfortunately, Tidal on Spark didn't do well with me.
So, when Devialet PRO goes Spark this is it what can be expected. Let's hope Dialog and he PRO streaming board become Roon Ready. The Dialog UPNP renderer (beta) suffers from the same as any other UPNP system I owned before. UPNP is not fit for purpose nowadays.
ly stored favorites.
Very different is usability: Roon is lightyears ahead of Spark in terms of library search, playqueue composition, display and handling of metafiles, transcoding, equalizing, room correction, in short everything that is necessary to prepare listening and acompany listening with enriched data.
It is not foreseable that Spark would catch up to Roon's league ever. Spark has a simple search function, can handle multiroom playback, compile a playqueue,find tracks, albums, and artists by name only, find similar artists, adjust playback volume and that's more or less it.
But Qobuz for me is a must have in terms of SQ and reliability of streaming. A pity Roon is unable to integrate streaming services other than Tidal. Devialet handles with Spark a number of streaming services and most of them well. Most of them also through their own apps, either directly (Spotify) or through BT or Airplay. Unfortunately, Tidal on Spark didn't do well with me.
So, when Devialet PRO goes Spark this is it what can be expected. Let's hope Dialog and he PRO streaming board become Roon Ready. The Dialog UPNP renderer (beta) suffers from the same as any other UPNP system I owned before. UPNP is not fit for purpose nowadays.
