Expert Pro update email

[David A]

So David, when you read "a request for certification" you interpret that as 'the work is done, please check' whereas I interpret it as 'we want to certify, please tell us how'. 

I hope your interpretation is right. With a bit of luck my Od'A will come back RAAT ready 

Pim,

When a company submits something for certification it's the organisation they're submitting the product to who have the say on whether the product is up to scratch or not. For some things like electrical devices which are submitted to a body for electrical safety certification the product can't be sold before the it receives certification. I asked my dealer about getting a Shunyata Denali power conditioner back in April and was told it was awaiting certification for power safety and 6 months on it's still awaiting certification and I have no idea how much longer that's going to take but Shunyata won't start manufacturing the Australian version for actual sale before it gets certification because until it gets certified there's no guarantee that they won't have to make alterations to it. In this case Devialet can't release the firmware update to us before Roon certify it so now it's in Roon's hands and they won't provide certification if the firmware doesn't do everything Roon expects a Roon Ready device to do. If Roon discover any problems it's back to Devialet to fix and then resubmit to Roon and that goes on until Roon are happy. How long the certification process will take depends on how well Devialet did with the firmware, how many errors Roon finds, and how hard those errors are to fix.

Given the turnaround time for upgrades to amps I suspect that your Od'A will be on it's way back to you before Roon give certification for the firmware so I would think you're likely to see your amps back with the current firmware rather than with the Roon Ready upgrade firmware. Danny was quoted as saying that certification usually takes a minimum of a couple of weeks and if your amps have already left for upgrade then it's likely they'll be on their way back to you before Roon certify the firmware update, even if Devialet have done a really good job with the firmware. If your amps get sent back to you with the current firmware, at least installing the RAAT update once it's released shouldn't take much in the way of time or effort and it's nothing like sending your amps away for upgrade.

This kind of thing works both ways. I would bet that Roon weren't able to include the current AIR compatibility in a Roon software release before Devialet said they were happy with how Roon had handled the incorporation of AIR in their software and no one is saying whether there were any hiccups along the way for that process.

While I want to see my 140 RAAT ready, I don't think I'm going to see any real change in how it works in my system in the short term. Roon with AIR has been really reliable for me, both before and after my amp got the CI upgrade, and I'm not streaming to more than one zone/device at the same time. Since I'm streaming over ethernet and the highest PCM resolution content I have is 176,4 kHz the limitation AIR has with resolutions of 176.4 kHz and higher over wifi doesn't affect me and DSD64, the highest resolution DSD content I have, is streaming without problems over Roon AIR via ethernet for me even though Devialet say there are problems with streaming DSD over AIR so I'm not sure if RAAT offers me any immediate advantages but I'd like to find out if it does when it comes to practice over theory. If you have more than one zone or you're using wifi the situation may well be different for you. What I can say is that like you and a lot of other people here, I'd like to see this update sooner rather than later.