Munich 2018

[IanG-UK]

I’ve been thinking about these slides some more over the weekend. All in all I came away feeling pretty negative, despite genuinely trying to be otherwise....

Despite covering some of the current issues they’re aware of, and a commitment to Roon, there doesn’t appear to be much of a plan:
-How will the Experts ultimately be controlled? Is it Spark? Is it the same ver the Phantoms use? When? They say they’re not bug fixing the ‘legacy’ iOS remote, but does this mean no remote, they’re building a new one, or its Spark?
-Configurator. Is it being replaced with a direct web control interface? Updates without SD cards? Timelines?  What features will it have? PEQ for example?
-Any integration with Phantoms planned? Subwoofers or whatever. What’s the reason for putting them all on th same codebase and adding PLC, just ease of development?
-Any future plans for evolving the system beyond 192 dsd64

The above are details, but nowhere in the slides did I get a sense of a concrete plan going forward beyond just getting through the current CI issues.

But maybe those that were there got a sense of some of the above.....

I guess a ‘these are our medium and long term plans for your expert’ cards would have been reassuring.

I suspect we did not get any of that for two reasons.

Firstly the new CEO has only been in place for two months and making organisational changes takes time, as I guess you might know from your own business involvement, both in the lead areas of product design and maunufacture but also the supporting areas of finance and HR and IT.

Secondly most of the historic cock-ups have been delay related. They won't want to get into that area again by setting out half-baked medium and long term plans a la Sannie. Hence CI I and CI II is what they should focus on, including fitting outstanding CI boards and encouraging Expert owners to get on to the Expert Pro structure.

Maybe they will say something about Phantom and Dialog and Spark elsewhere - but to raise that in Munich with those who are almost exclusively Expert would have been a silly tactic in my opinion.