I’m in my 2 week Roon trial period and loving it.
I have outputs in my living room and bedroom that work well for serious listening, or as background to serious reading, serious web browsing, or serious drinking.
I’m thinking of adding output to a family room that is close to our kitchen and dining room.
The Devialet Phantom looks attractive.
Given the cost, is it ready for prime time?
Does it offer not only great SQ but also reasonably reliable, family-friendly integration with Roon (and with the Apple ecosystem)? Is the customer support pretty good (either from the company itself or from a user community)? Does Devialet offer close to a plug-and-play experience?
(I love digital music but also am nostalgic for pre-digital ease-of-use, the era when you could unbox a few components, spend 30 minutes setting them up, then forget about the back panels for 5 years. I miss the ease of front panel knobs … though I don’t miss dealing with dust and scratches, skips and pops on LPs, and don’t quite get the nostalgia for vinyl other than the album art.)
User ‘srima’ on the Devialetchat forum (which would be a good place to search for additional info), wrote an absolutely glowing review of the Phantom Golds a couple of months ago. His latest post from a few days ago, in response to a question of whether someone should buy Silver or Gold Phantoms is below:
I wrote a highly positive review of the Gold a while back, but I don’t recommend them anymore. The software is just too unreliable. Don’t buy either till Devialet fixes their broken software. Sad, their hardware is brilliant, their software is infantile compared to the competition.
This software/firmware stability comment is not an uncommon criticism of Devialet - both Phantom and Expert series - but opinions vary and some will follow up here no doubt and say they’re amazing. Devialet customer support isn’t good either in my experience, but again opinions vary. That said the hardware is good - well, the Experts anyway, I don’t have a Phantom (for the above reasons).
Best advice, if they still do the 45 day free trial is to see for yourself.
As for Roon - they’re not RoonReady so you’ll need a way to get the music in - there are some topics here if you search for Phantom.