Munich 2018

[GuillaumeB]

Just to give a bit more detail about the event.

Mathieu Pernod was invited to the stage to answer questions. We immediately kicked off with a discussion about clocking and reclocking of sources. Mathieu’s initial reaction was that this was too complicated a subject to be covered in a small session, and he seemed a little reluctant to divulge too much detail at first. I think a white paper can be expected in the coming months that will touch on this and other topics.

So for me the takeaways were such:

- there is an improved clock in the CI board which benefits the entire unit, this is thanks to the availability of better clocking components now available from OEM sources
- the Expert unit extracts the clock from the SPDIF/AES feed in the normal way, so as per the SPDIF protocol (we didn’t go into a lot of detail here)
- using off board reckocking (for e.g. Mutec) will result in a better source, and the Devialet always being transparent to the source will play this faithfully.
- the concept of freedom of choice came up a few times, Devialet are providing us with the flexibility to use whichever input we want in the way that we want... they don’t want to judge our choices and if we want to use another DAC and feed this to an analogue input then fine!
- the digital link... there are no technical advantages to going AES v SPDIF on the companion input. Both hybrid and regular SPDIF cables should sound the same. The AES input is always transformer coupled, that’s not exclusive to the Devialet. The advantage of the hybrid cable is freeing up an input on the Companion. There are plans to enable a second digital input for daisy chaining purposes.

Guillaume