dCS Puccini Clock

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.

I do not agree with your theory.

If dCS was "affraid" of their CD bussines, why would they offer the optional upsampling from external digital inputs feature at the first place ?

The Scarlatti upsampler on the other hand, looks to me to be an afterthought. Remember, that the Scarlatti range was first introduced back in 2005, long before PC-Audio took off, so introducing the external upsampler was the only way to offer the benefits of upsampling to the PC-Audio users.

This is the first I have heard about this. I am not sure, but I believe the DSD license may have a part to play in the price.

There have been many people trying to block the ability to send hi rez digital outputs to external boxes in domestic equipment due to pirating. I am not saying that DCS are correct to charge for the upgrade, but may have a part to play and could be down to Sony and copyright law.

DCS are a great little company and I have both old and new DCS stacks. The Scarlatti is one of the finest digital playback systems I have ever heard. The Elgar plus/verona/ la scarla is no slouch either.

It is expensive, and there is no getting away from that, but I think it is more to do with the way the Hi fi distribution works with huge mark ups and not so much down to the cost of their manufacturing overheads.

It maybe worth a call to them. I have only ever had 1st class service from them.