dCS Puccini Clock

Nothing wrong with having to pay for extra features that expand units functionality, IMO.

If they ask you to pay for software update that fixes bugs etc - that would be another story.

It is gouging.

I think dCS is sort of a joke, at this point. I mean the prices for their products, as good as they are, are so disgustingly inflated now that they are basically the exclusive playthings for oil sheiks and other greedy corporate types. At a certain point, "high-end" just becomes "high-falutin" nonense. Selling a licensing for firmware that enables functionality that the unit should have included to begin with? The only reason for requiring such a license is that they know that once the upsampling functionality is enabled, users will be able to use music server on the cheap products like Squeezebox and Transporter to great effect, bypassing the need for U-Clock, Scarlatti Upsampler and whatever other outrageously overpriced USB to SPDIF converter they can cook up this year. They are basically holding proper music server functionality hostage.

If Microsoft could enable true 1080P output on its standard XBOX with the flick of a switch but we were expected to pay them a license for the firmware update there would be mass upheaval. I have $100 sound cards and $300 PC graphics cards that get almost monthly driver updates free of charge. My computer motherboard practically gets a free firmware update everymonth--in some cases enabling radically new functionality. But as an audiophile, I am supposed to simply lap up David J M Steven's marketing bullshit and pay for a basic functionality fix--why exactly? I can only conclude that dCS finds its customers to be saps who are easily parted from their money.

I wouldn't give them another nickel.

Blackstonejd,

I have to agree with you. I have wrongly thought, that the new "upsampling from digital inputs feature" requires additional hardware updates.

Since it is only a case of software update, I think this is unfair.

Well I only know about from this thread. My reading of it above was that it is enabled through firmware. "License" means software, in my mind. Unit specific license means software.

When I first heard about Puccinni/Paganini, the very first thing that came to mind was "but does it upsample external sources?" I actually commented in another thread, quite a while ago, that the whole Paganini/Puccinni line was decidedly music server unfriendly because of the way the upsampler is built into the transport. This was, in my mind, an obvious and (probably an intentional) omission on the part of dCS. Are you telling me that the hardware exists for upsampling of external sources but they have only recently developed the firmware for that? I think not. Most likely they saw/see servers as a threat to their high-end cd transport business and intentionally omitted this functionality. It gives their transports a built in performance advantage. It also allows them to sell a redundant (but possibly improved) upsampler in their Scarlatti line.