Any feedback on Phanotom from Paris and/or London?

[f1eng]

I think Devialet were expecting "Expert" owners to want Dialog.  Why else would Devialet themselves announce that Dialog would work with the Expert range "via USB initially" at the Phantom / Dialog launch last year?

Under pressure from legacy owners looking for something new?
The experience they have had will show them legacy owners will want extra functions they had never planned
I still believe that Dialog is part of the Phantom system and making it work with the legacy amps will be of secondary importance to Devialet and certainly can not be done at the expense of the Phantom system, perhaps not an afterthought but almost certainly not a principle aim of the Dialog concept.
Probably the same with the remote.

I for one would be happy as a "legacy owner" with a product that worked reliably as advertised.  Although I don't suffer from problems with AIR as badly as others have reported, it is still not without problems streaming 16/44 material from an Apple machine using Apple network components as recommended by Devialet.

Devialet themselves have muddied the waters, and perhaps created a rod for their own back, by suggesting that Dialog is a work-around for these problems.  That's not the solution I want; Devialet need to fix AIR so that the Expert range is a properly-working product in its own right.

As to future enhancements to the Expert range: that would be fine and dandy provided they don't mess up what's already been delivered, but personally I don't demand or expect anything more than what was promised when I bought the equipment.

My main worry is that there will always be a "next big thing" like Phantom that diverts engineering resources away from fixing what Devialet have already delivered.  Will we be having a similar disscussion in a year's time about flakiness in Phantom, Dialog or Spark that Devialet haven't got time to fix because they've been working so hard on something that's going to sell to yet another much wider audience?

Sorry to be a bit pessimistic, but that's how it feels to me at the moment.

I tend to agree. Let us hope not!
My best Devialet experience(s) have been with the D-Premier early on.
It has gone backwards since, for one reason or another. The only positives are my updated units are supposed to have a bigger power supply capability and more DSP, which I do not benefit from. With the latest firmware it runs about 10C cooler.
Air is no better and I have lost my HDMI input