Some sign of Expert line

[ssfas]

SAM is cheap for Devialet. It's an established process so no need to pay for research and development. The creation of a profile is an automated process for them, they have a setup that is small and easily transportable which they can take to locations like a dealer's showroom in some locations or you can send one of your speakers to them. It's easy for them to add new speaker profiles at low cost because they don't have to buy or rent the speakers in order to do it, they largely rely on using the speakers of Devialet owners. There are no distribution costs for profiles, just add the profiles to their database and anyone can access and instal a profile by using the Configurator.

But SAM is not without problems. When they introduced their Sweet Room room correction system 2.5 years ago we discovered that it did not play well with SAM, or that SAM does not play well with Sweet Room, take your choice of how you want to say that. Sweet Room offers 9 correction points if you don't use SAM but what users discovered when they started using Sweet Room was that they could only use 5 correction points. Devialet did not announce that when they released Sweet Room  and they only acknowledged that problem some months after the release of Sweet Room.

Did they know about it when they released Sweet Room? We don't know but if they did know they withheld the information which caused problems for  people using SAM who wanted to use Sweet Room. There's obviously an incompatibility at present between those 2 features and 2.5 years on it still has not been fixed.

If Devialet didn't know about the problem when they released Sweet Room then obviously they didn't bother testing it using speakers with a SAM profile active which is a stupid thing for them to have done. They should have known that a lot of users use SAM and that more than a few of them would want to use Sweet Room as well. That's poor research and development. If they knew about it then at the very least they should have pointed out the limitation users would have if they used Sweet Room in conjunction with a SAM  profile and ideally they should have done more work and solved the problem before releasing Sweet Room.

Either way, the fact that there have been no firmware releases for 2.5 years, that there were bugs before that last release and that last release included this problem, and there are still one or two features promised when they released the Expert Pro range with the CI board 6 years ago which have still not been delivered shows that for at least the last 2.5 they have not been interested in doing the software research and development still needed to get the Expert Pro range working properly with all of the features they promised.

Continuing to release new SAM profiles is not a particularly strong "sign of life" for the Expert Pro line. It probably doesn't even take a technician to create a new SAM profile. Fixing the software problems with the line and delivering the last of those features they promised back when the line was introduced takes programming work and extensive software testing and a lot more time and money than creating a SAM profile but that's what would constitute a genuine "sign of life" for the range.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with my Expert Pro. It does all the things I want it to do at the moment but I think it could still work better with Roon which I use. I'm not about to jump ship and swap to another amp but if something changes in my needs and I wanted one of the promised but not yet developed features or if I wanted to use a room correction system then I would move to a different amplifier. I would not wait for Devialet to fix their bugs or provide the missing feature they had promised because time has shown that they are neither committed nor interested in doing that.

I think the Expert Pro is a great amp but when it comes to firmware and capabilities, it was released before they had the software ready to deliver everything they had promised. They still have not delivered on their promises which is something I regard as a "breach of contract" since they advertised fulfilment of those promises as part of the deal when we bought our amps, and they haven't provided the software support to fix the bugs. They always seem to be invested in releasing the next new product and those new products seem to come with similar limitations and software support problems.

They don't provide the support they should be providing and they were dishonest in their advertising when they released the Expert Pro line. If Devialet released a new range of Experts with promises about what it would deliver in features via firmware releases over time, I would not buy one unless it delivered everything I wanted and was bug free at the time of purchase because they've shown that they don't keep their promises and aren't committed to fixing software bugs.

When I bought a 250 Pro CI in December 2016 they promised Qobuz onboard and it never arrived, so I kept using a usb streamer. The software was a bit flaky. There was a big upgrade in 2017 with the CI card. In October 217 I was in the Paris Rue Saumur store and a complete new firmware etc was promised. that never arrived. In February 2019 there was an upgrade with Roon Ready.

To be honest, it's been faultless since 2017 and I've been using Roon most of the time since 2019.

As I now seem to listen mostly to vinyl, I'm thinking of moving to an all-analogue system, but it's not because Expert performs anything other than brilliantly. 

This thread just exemplifies that with digital products people want new rather than older ones, even if the older ones are really completely up-to-date. This is far less of an issue with analogue products.