Devialet Dialog

[GuillaumeB]

I must say that the more I read the more confused I get. Why would we want Dialog to support AIR? Isn't it the case that SPARK will be an alternative to iTunes (or J River/Audirvana etc) + AIR?

Put another way, if I had a Dialog with SPARK running on my iPad, why would I want AIR running on a laptop somewhere? Surely that would mean two control points and two setups to worry about. 

Rather I would expect and want the Dialog box to take the place of my laptop, and SPARK running on my iPad to be my only control point. The Dialog box would then pull music files from any storage devices connected to the network, and these could include the hard drive of my laptop and my QNAP NAS. 

It's quite possible that I have got this completely wrong mind you! 

Guillaume

I'm hoping for exactly the same "use case" as you, but perhaps using the terminology differently.  There are (at least!?) three things we're calling AIR:

• the "virtual sound card" software running on a PC or Mac
  
• the on-wire protocol that's used to transmit the data, control the amplifier, etc.
  
• the firmware on the D-series amplifier that receives streamed audio from the PC or Mac
  

In my mind, Dialog sounds like it will have the first two things built into it allowing it to be used as the "streamer" instead of a PC or Mac.  But the fact that it uses the AIR protocol to do so means that feature of the D-series amplifiers' firmware shouldn't become neglected -- or worse, deprecated and no longer supported.

So are we basically saying that Dialog will be a hybrid of UPnP and AIR technologies? So UPnP for the "pulling" and AIR for the "pushing" from the Dialog box to the Devialet amplifier?

I'm just trying to understand how this will be different from, say, the Auralic ARIES which uses UPnP and pushes the PCM stream to the Devialet via USB. 

I suppose where I'm heading with this is... aren't we now seeing the demise of AIR? 

Guillaume