Don’t forget Google Assistant – is that what they’re calling Chromecast these days?
So am I testifying for the defence or the prosecution?
Good question.
“The fog of war.”
But I think I’m the prosecution, accusing much of the audio industry of falling behind user trends, lifting old stuff to the upper limit, polishing the turd.
By helping illustrate those that are not stuck in the old ways, I think you are helping the prosecution.
I’m only partly facetious.
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This was/is absolutely my thinking. I have renewed my amplification with the Chord Ultima range (I still rate Chord Electronics highly" but have gone dCS with the DAC/Streamer; including network input. But the cost was very high indeed.
On 1. , point taken, at least if you want to enlarge your music sources to include networked which of course, as Roon users, we do. 2. and 3 aren’t really old think, just bad design in the first place. I loath wall warts and power bricks. But they exempt manufacturers from obtaining UL certification–needed for things sold commercially that run on AC. And I can hardly believe IR control has survived as the de facto standard for this long. Not only line of sight, but one way. Especially annoying with things that have power toggle only (as opposed to discrete on and off commands), and the remote has no idea whether your thing is currently on or off.
I’ve been having a battle with the developers of the (hopefully) soon to be released “Unfolded Circle” (formerly “YIO”) remote. They see no reason for supporting RS232 control. It may be an antiquated data transmission protocol, but it’s practically the de facto standard for professional a/v equipment–and it’s two way, or state aware. In order for a home user to take advantage of it, about the only way is to pay some “integrator” a huge fee for Creston or Remote 1 (they don’t sell their stuff to mortals). There are IP to RS232 adapters, but I may need help with the coding. Hopefully I will get it . Time will tell–when I finally get my remote.
p.s. Unfolded Circle is also suspending development for Roon support, as their Roon user left the team. Boo!
Regarding IR remote…
A while back I started playing around with Home Assistant in anticipation of Harmony going away. (I know, it might be 1 year or 20 years depending on what they end up doing with their servers and codes database.)
I was pleasently surprised to find out that everything in my setup has ip control (with a little help from mqtt for the pc client). And HA had “cards” for all of it. After a bit of learning curve and playing around, I had a working “universal” remote.
I had resisted app based remotes, but now I have the HA companion app on my phone and my tablet and an old salvage tablet in a common area. I havent touched our harmony hub remote in months. The only exception is the Tivo remote, which neither of us will give up until their inevitable demise.
I also have links to remote apps (including tivo) for when the occasional deep dive into settings or whatever is needed.
KEF is doing this with the LS50W, right?
I suspect we don’t see bigger gambles in this area because of the failure points, and because of the subjectivity of sound: in a networked speaker, you have network interface, streaming, transport, digital conversion, amplification … all in one box. You could get all of them right and slightly miss on one thing, and the whole effort would be for naught. Or, you could nail everything and miss out on a large chunk of the market because of “X” (X being the arbitrary preference of some group of people).
If you mail it, you laugh all the way to the bank … but it’s hard to nail it.
The conversation has drifted to all-integrated systems, but I think that’s a sledgehammer approach to the original problem.
And as pointed out, this has problems.
The solution is industry standards, and vendors keeping up with modern technology.
I have a Dell computer, if I had to get a Dell monitor, a Dell photo printer, a Dell scanner/printer/copier, a Dell laptop, a Dell tablet and a Dell phone, that would be limiting.
Instead I have a Dell computer, a Benq monitor, an Epson photo printer, an HP scanner/printer/copier, a Mac laptop, an iPad and an iPhone, and they all work together. I just had to power up the printers (both Epson and HP) and give them the WiFi password, and all the devices can print.
In our industry, such interoperability works only if we are stuck in the 70s.
But it’s not a problem for me, all I have to do is choose the products that keep up with the times, and walk away from the others.
I’m throwing this out there, but isn’t AES67, now nine years old, what studios are adopting with Dante-compatibility (or really the other way around) for Audio-over-IP? Relative to consumer products, AES67 allows for a maximum of 24/96 bitstreams, but a large amount of interconnected control for everything from mixing boards to mic preamps to outboard processors to active monitors (and probably amps in there also for passive monitors). Dante has PC-compatible solutions also to integrate your systems and DAW into a full AoIP solution.
I wonder if/when consumer products may start adopting these interfaces (with a WiFi component I believe). Compatibility will be required for our current “legacy” solutions, but it seems the time is coming for these types of systems to appear in our homes.
The industry should invent gear that wouldn’t need dusting. Dusting hifi gear is not my favorite.
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I have a dust n polish pixie who appears to enjoy doing mine.
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You bought the wrong gear for your aesthetic needs, that’s easy enough to fix. What you’re not taking into consideration is that at the high end price point many manufacturers refuse to use technologies that they feel are not up to snuff on their products. Alpha Reference 3 DAC, a piece of hardware that would arguably shame the Chord Dave, well they don’t even include USB input in their DAC Let alone an additional source of noise such as an Ethernet port! At the high end, more and more effort is spent on the power supply which means that many devices remove it from the primary chassis in the first place as, well they’re noisy and removing noise makes things sound better.
Vendors will do what vendors will and in many instances what you point out as an archaic stance of omission, there’s a high end vendor touting their decision not to use those “conveniences” as a performance choice.
BTW my DAC has an Ethernet port and I love it, Roon does too. 
Yeah, there’s a lot of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” in the audio industry.
Is going?
We are already there man. Have been for years.
Ask your kids/grandkids ! 
Yeah, I know.
I wanted to be polite.