Simon I just wish Sonos would co-operate!

[DavidHB]

(18-06-2014 23:39)wappinghigh Wrote:  Well Kinsky has next to no popular music streamers for starters. No Multichannel support. And no DSD support. Those three reasons alone are enough to prevent me from using it. And I have a Linn DS streamer....

I'd regard these as additions to core functionality; their absence is, I suppose, part of the "restricted feature set" point I made in my previous post.

None of these issues would be deal-breakers for me, but I have no idea how representative your and my differing views are of the real state of the marketplace. Linn presumably have to have some kind of informed view, or they wouldn't still be in business.

They have been clear about why they do not provide DSD support; obviously, you disagree with their view. As regards the lack of music streamers, I confess to both limited interest and limited knowledge, but would have thought that Linn see Songcast as their software link from external services to a Linn player. After an earlier foray into multi-channel media, they seem to have stepped back from providing that capability (apart from the HDMI pass-through they now fit to their DSMs). I am not qualified to judge whether these were wise marketing decisions, but they do seem to have been the product of conscious thought.

Those of us who use Linn products have to accept that they are, in some respects, a rather weird company with, on occasion, some seemingly crazy ideas. The really annoying thing is that they often carry off those crazy ideas rather well ...

Quote:Linn Simply fails to spend big on developing the true capabilities of this software..

Again, we cannot expect any company to 'spend big' on products or features for which they do not see a profitable market. Software, for the likes of Linn, Naim and Lumin is a free add-on to their hardware; software features presumably will not be developed unless they provide essential capabilities or give the hardware a competitive edge.

I'd guess that, for Linn, 'spending big' is measured not so much in money as in the time and effort of very scarce skilled programmers. In that regard, Linn do seem to have made their commitment to a big spend, in the development of Kazoo (CP and server). That decision indicates that their priorities for software development are not the same as either yours or mine. But does it make their CP applications 'lousy'? Not in my book.

David