17-Jul-2015, 07:04
(17-Jul-2015, 05:55)markush Wrote: Another month has passed by - any news if this is gonna happen in 2015 or anytime soon?I was actually discussing this very subject with Devialet's Mathieu Pernod at the Oxford Audio Phantom launch this Wednesday. He was not too specific with respect to an actual date, but did say that they were looking at 2016. A while back I sent a fairly blunt query to Devialet support and got the answer "by Christmas". Thinking about it, I don't think they said which year's Christmas! Although I guess were are looking at first quarter 2016 now. As markush says above, this is indeed a little disappointing. In discussions with Mathieu I did ask the obvious question of why such a simple thing was taking so long, interestingly he was very clear that Expert / USB integration was not simple, stating that the software side of things was actually very complex. So as with many things Devialet, the hardware arrives and is very impressive, the software side is a little hit and miss and in this case a little slow in implementation.
Unfortunately it's really very disappointing to see that actually a promising piece of hardware is being introduced to the market and it turns out to be missing the appropriate software for a month :-(
We also discussed the implementation of surround sound in the Dialog, I was interested if it was possible to have a set up with the "Expert" amp(s) on front channel duties, integrated by Dialog with Phantoms for centre and rear speakers, which would be quite a neat set up. A bit of good news and bad news one this, the good news is that yes, this will be possible and is indeed planned for implementation. The biggest technical and software challenges being getting the lip sync and timing issues right. The bad news is that this will probably be for anything up to Dolby Digital only. So no Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio. Why not? Licencing / cost issues, rather than technical restrictions apparently.
So everybody.... Enjoy the summer, forget about Dialog for now, something to look forward to in the winter .....
As a final positive note, based on what I saw at the Phantom demonstration, Spark and Dialog appears to be working reasonably well now.
(Anyone taking bets on Dialog with Expert implementation for Munich 2016?)
