Mosaic 2.0 . The next thing?

dCS Products Feature Requests
21

I disagree with your premise. Mosaic has absolutely no impact in my enjoyment of either music or my dCS gear. I only use Mosaic for hardware settings. I prefer dCS spend their time and resources on improving their DAC’s (and Upsampler’s). I see them as a hardware manufacturer not as a substitute for my software of choice.

I know I am probably in the minority here but I think they are putt too much effort into headphone related products but I am sure they have a better idea of where the growth in this crazy hobby is.

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With all due respect Jim @still-one, that is flawed reasoning. Your individual usage or preference is not a prescription either for corporate strategy or user experience.

A crucial strategic question from dCS’ point of view is ‘Do I want to be unbundled or not?’. Both choices have advantages and disadvantages. Being unbundled reduces the aspects I can compete on to sound and build. And I risk becoming too exchangeable. Being bundled means more investment in Mosaic. It can widen the strategic moat and increase the potential audience.

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23

Corporate strategy and product strategy are infinitely more complex issues than this statement suggests. There’s a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty. So I actually welcome and expect disagreement, but a different kind.

24

Roon degrades the dcs sound. I am not the only smart arse to think so!

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I require little education on the intricacies of developing and executing corporate strategies. I was responsible for a multi-billion dollar portion of our business and the utilization of both fiscal and human capital was always a balancing act.

As I am not privy to dCS’s Strategic Plan I can only surmise where they may be heading from the few comments they have made over the years and from recent product launches. When Mosaic was first released they indicated that they were not trying to develop a product to compete with the likes of Roon.

From my perspective dCS plays in the same sandbox as MSB. Top notch hardware in both SQ and industrial design. Leave the GUI to others. The next tier would be the likes of Lumin and Aurender. Lumin is a bit more flexible but Aurender requires you to use their software.

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And there are many of us who disagree.

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I’m sure dCS has a backlog including Mosaic, based on priority and capacity and strategy.

I use Mosaic only for settings, at which it’s great. Otherwise, I use Roon or other apps.

I like the dCS investment in headfi. Love the Bartok with HPA. I have another great all-in-one-system for headfi (Warwick Bravura). I’ve become a big headphone listener in my later years. Just don’t have the ability to optimize a two channel system right now. Headfi instead.

There’s a big headfi community and market. A good funnel for future customers.

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Good. I can judge strategy and execution as i run money. For the purpose of the strategy discussion we should both be competent. Which industry were you in? Tech is a rather peculiar field.

True. That’s a comparatively high level remark for the question at hand. It’s also brief dare I say easy compared to the depth of thinking I put into the argument above. But to the point - in this case it’s not a scarcity issue in my view. More an investment into securing the future and expanding the customer base.

As you saw, I’m challenging the strategy as it is evidenced by the state of and approach to development of Mosaic. dCS is in a niche of a niche of a niche. That can be long term profitable as evidenced by the many hidden champions of the German Mittelstand. As a niche player you can be margin squeezed or simply swept away. If it were my business, I would want to be more than a pure hardware purveyor. But I am risk averse, so that’s my leaning.

That’s more of a market snapshot from a consumer perspective. Markets and solutions move fast. That’s why I took the time to write about the customer problem. It’s a foundation to base long term tech strategy on.

@still-one @bruno @Goodstuff The touchy Roon SQ issue… From a technical perspective the unpacked data stream is identical. The process of unpacking the stream should be inaudible. So dCS processing only and Roon in the mix should sound the same. And in my ears I keep gravitating away from Roon for listening and only use it for the user interface. A dCS employee mentioned something along the lines that he found a 50/50 split in comments on the internet. Together with the technical reality he then sort of dismissed the issue. One can view it differently too. (And please no ire from anyone now. We had that before and it leads nowhere.) We perceive things differently as humans. Especially something as complex and rich as music. Maybe the analogy of Times Square helps illuminate that. Ask two people standing side by side looking onto the square what they see. Both will tell a very different story. We filter, we have a history, we have experience, we have dispositions. To me a much more plausible view is that there is a 50/50 split where one half perceives a difference and the other doesn’t. One is not mad and the other is not ungifted. That would be far too narrow a judgement. Both are right - we simply are different. Long story short, if that view is right a good portion of dCS customers does legitimately not like to use Roon for SQ reasons.

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29

If u r using Roon with dCS through Network interface and do not use DSPs of Roon, Roon will not impact sound quality. In that scenario Roon is only making the data move from your music server to dCS over network. The data do not pass through the server where Roon Core is running.

Roon impacts sound quality when you are connecting the server where Roon Core is running to dCS (or any dac) over USB. Or when you use internal DSP settings of Roon.

Regards,
Sourav

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30

So, is that why I’m preferring tidal connect on mosaic rather than Roon? Because I’m bypassing my nucleus altogether?

31

I would like to keep the discussion focussed on the necessity or not to substantially improve the Mosaic user experience. Plus cogent ways to improve.

We are on the verge of going into a Roon rabbithole which is off topic. To close the issue… Glen @Gforce74, short answer is yes. All music you initiate in Roon’s interface travels packed inside their RAAT protocol. When a device is Roon Ready it means it reliably understands RAAT. They had to establish a protocol so they can sit on top of many devices. I’m not 100% sure and a quick search didn’t say. From my understanding when you use Roon’s interface to start music the origin of the music (seen from the streamer’s side) is always the Roon core. When you use Mosaic the dCS gear connects directly to the services like Tidal or a NAS running a UPnP server like MinimServer. It then relies on the various protocols of Tidal, Qobuz or UPnP.

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32

Only except one thing:
The DAC and Upsampler’s sync model can be changed automatically when different input is selected.

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Do we have members with know how or backgrounds in marketing, strategy, software product management, design, etc. who want to contribute some thinking?

34

Hi,

Say what is all about and we see if we can be helpful ?

35

Yes, good point. I’ll frame the issue.

My personal motivation is to eventually get a truly rad version of Mosaic so I can ditch the bothersome Roon workaround. I’m in the group of people who perceive Roon’s sound signature as inferior to dCS’s own. So I’d like maximum sound quality and a great user interface. But that’s just me. Not a sufficient reason to change anything. Judging by the state of Mosaic and the generous reply by @James above, there’s no step change on the horizon. Now I’m attempting to make a case for a serious investment of brainpower into Mosaic, because it makes good business sense too (from my experience). That way we together can perhaps convince dCS to venture there.

Maybe it’s good to view the issue of Mosaic from both the user’s perspective and from dCS’s. To begin, the user either cares about Mosaic or he doesn’t. The first camp (1) either consciously doesn’t want Roon / another GUI (graphical user interface) workaround or (2) they are sort of happy with Mosaic or (3) they are less of a die hard audiophile who knows or wants to know his way around these things. The second camp has another GUI solution (e.g. Roon or Aurender Conductor or Innuos Sense) and is content with that.

From dCS’s viewpoint it’s a very different perspective. And here we can only make educated guesses. A view could be the one voiced by Jim @still-one: I’m confident in my ability to be in business long term based on my excellence of designing and manufacturing DACs, clocks and amplifiers. Or a bit more general two channel digital music playback systems at the highest end. Then Mosaic is not so important. I’m making the point that that’s a risky long term strategy. Can I out-engineer? Will anybody care? Will my crown jewel intellectual property (IP) be relevant tomorrow? How expensive is a major shift away from that IP? Will I be fast enough when it happens? Do I have the capital for that? Am I being commoditized through the unbundling of the user interface as the PC industry was? Technology and markets move so fast. Another strategic approach is to look at the customer problems described above and reshape the solution. And at first - my belief is - drastically improving Mosaic is a good choice for reshaping. I can attract a different customer aside from audiophile die-hards and status symbol collectors. The unbundling via Roon has already happened, so it’s too late to become all integrated again. But it can be a situation like on a Mac where I can choose between Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook. Mosaic should be the Apple Mail in my eyes.

Now… I can reason all day and it will still be too little. Just one mind. We have highly competent people here as members. The issue of whether and how to upgrade Mosaic to another level touches several disciplines: corporate strategy, marketing strategy, software product management, software design and development, alliances, etc. I would love to read thinking from others with relevant backgrounds. Pro’s and con’s, opportunities, pitfalls, etc. (BTW, I believe we are not getting far by collecting Mosaic feature requests.)

To maybe start the discussion - one of the issues I see is: (how) can a manufacturer of industry leading digital audio attract industry leading software people? Those are two worlds with different languages and approaches. It’s all conjecture, but it might be an issue next to the size of the monetary investment.

Or: What’s the value of Mosaic from a marketing or corporate strategy perspective? I.e. market share, loyalty, strategic moat, etc.

Or: How do I position Mosaic against Roon and others?

Or: How do I get to product market fit seeing Mosaic as the product?

Or: What are the design challenges?

36

So, I’m not qualified to contribute to a strategic discussion of corporate strategy nor am I qualified to offer dCS business advice.

I am qualified to speak as a fan of Bartok 2.0 and a consumer who uses the product daily. Here’s my basic question: is it a huge deal to ask for a horizontal grid presentation for tablet users and the release year of music titles? These features have been available on Auralic’s controller app for their products and the controller app for Innuos products for several years now. I would not be at all surprised if these features are offered on other company’s controller apps as well. It’s clear that both Tidal and Qobuz offer the data necessary for third party apps to include this in their GUI.

If someone from dCS has addressed the feasibility of these two minor improvements and I’ve missed them here, I’m hoping someone will direct me to the posts.

Finally, would other Mosaic users like myself oppose these small tweaks? If these two straightforward ideas are prohibitively expensive, it would be good to simply know. I’m certainly not riled up about any of this…just making a simple request for a couple of useful features. If the answer is, “Bridge too far,” or “Bigger fish to fry”, that’s fine.

37

Yet another plea – to add to the many already here - for a grid-based album display option. It was already in my geriatric-old initial dCS app, but seems never to have been successfully ported over to Mosaic. And to see it still missing from this update is disappointing!

38

Siri Shortcuts would be nice - it would be great to be able to say “Hey Siri, Rossini input one.”

39

Mosaic does less than I’d like it to, but more than I need it to. Not uncommonly for software, the things that I need Mosaic to do it would accomplish better if it did less overall :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

A bit of explaining required, probably — that might read like the rantings of a very silly man.

The only use case I have for Mosaic is noodling with the DAC’s settings, since it’s easier to do that on my phone or iPad than it is on the device itself.

Following on from that, it’s worth thinking through the checklist I’d have in mind I were buying a new DAC. In descending order of priority:

  1. Ethernet input.
  2. Roon-ready.
  3. Sounds better than my current DAC.
  4. Attractive, with a tasteful display. (If it looked like it was related to my Perf10 I’d just hide it.)
  5. Affordable without too much wincing.

1–3 aren’t negotiable for me.

I’ve worked in and around software for a while now, and know that doing it well isn’t for the faint of heart, especially with integrations (hardware, APIs etc.) to stay on top of. Roon do a great job — not perfect, but for me Roon betters the competition by quite some margin, including Apple’s horrendous efforts. The macOS and iOS Music apps’ UX and UI drives me sideways.

I love knowing that the Roon crew have made a clear decision about where they focus their efforts — they’ve been crystal clear about not straying into the audio side of things beyond delivering bit-perfect 1s and 0s. It’s why they got my money for a lifetime subscription and a Roon Nucleus+.

I’d rather dCS stayed similarly focused — on the signal processing side of things (I include Expanse in this). The dCS DACs are wonderful, and nail 1–4 pretty well. Even #5 if I indulge in a bit of audio-maths, by rationalizing box count and tweakery — no USB or extra transport gubbins. It’s why they got my money for a Bartok, and why they’re about to get my money for a Rossini Apex too.

Note: All of the above is based on me hearing no difference between music played via Roon and Mosaic, and between a sensibly isolated Ethernet input from a Roon Nucleus and a $5k transport. I tried really hard. Then I tried not at all, just in case I was skewing results towards gawd-wasn’t-this-supposed-to-be-a-fun-hobby?! Had I heard a difference I’m note sure what I would have done — I’m way too sold on the setup, UX and UI benefits of Roon.

Yes, becoming dependent on third-parties should be a concern for dCS. If Roon were to go pop I’d be gutted. But uninformed me wonders if sticking to the knitting for each business might be as much a recipe for their continued existence as it would a hedge against unwelcome dependence!

Would I like Mosaic to be better, though? Of course. There are plenty of people who don’t need or want what Roon can do. Some of them prefer the sound of Mosaic-delivered tunes to RAAT-delivered tunes — I want them to be as happy with Mosaic as I am with Roon :slight_smile:

As an aside that I find interesting: I bet that one of the trickiest things for Roon to do is find and display results in one place. Unless Mosaic can show Tidal, Qobuz and local files in one place, and with metadata of similar quality, it’d be a non-starter for me as a way to queue up tunes.

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40

Mosaic is ten times faster to launch than Roon and it is free.

I will always support dCS in their effort improving Mosaic.

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