I can read that 12 members found a noticeable improvement with the 4.8 update. 7 observed a very clear uplift, some of these said “ whouah!”.
5 observed a little improvement.
All of these 12 members, I am in the bunch, found an improvement in clarity and easiness. Some said the sound is more dynamic.
2 members observed no improvement.
Has anyone done a blind test?
Sir please sir ! he said blind test sir
I think it’s crazy to apparently change the sound of a product, people purchased on the basis is of it sound and to change it even apparently for the better is a risk as evident here.
That is interesting indeed.
I personally would go mad if i would constantly hear those kinds of changes in my audio i think…
However, 95% of the time the people who are able to hear these changes report improvements to their sound rather then degradations, so i guess it’s not a problem for them. It must be kind of nice actually to be able to constantly upgrade your sound like that.
But you also emphasized in another post that these are subtle changes. Clearly these can happen based on the execution timing stuff. But some people are writing about large changes as if Naim totally changed the sound. Now I don’t have an old streamer but I can’t hear any of this on mine (for which other people also perceived changes, some better and some worse), and the available info about the execution timing does not give a reason to think that’s the case.
And while yes, Clare wrote that the updates are tested for sound (as we all know), she also wrote:
Personally I think the topic deserves an official and public clear statement/explanation
2 members wrote about finding no improvement. There are probably many who didn’t find it necessary to comment that nothing changed
The beauty with naim firmware on the legacy streamers is you can reload the original firmware if you don’t like the new one. To me this is a win win situation as my music will either sound better with a free upgrade otherwise I can keep what I originally had. I done this going from 4.4 to 4.6 then went back to 4.4 as it sounded better in my system. I tried this at a friends house who has an nds too and in his system 4.6 was clearly better. It really is good to have the choice, and long may that continue.
And likewise many that did find it changing.
Yes IMO it’s probably the same old hifi geek excitement, power cables are like night & day & IC’s like a box upgrade.
As I said before I know what I hear & that’s all I need to know.
There are also people who found an SQ difference between app versions, people who found a difference for SQ over wifi after changing the power supply of the router, and one person swearing that bass was missing after some small change only for the forum to find out that the bi-wiring links to the bass driver were not connected and never had been
And probably many other who found an improvement and are not on the forum. 
I remember that for the first update on the new streamers, a lot found a real and nice improvement.
For updates on the old streamers, between 4.4 and 4.6, some found a decrease in sound, other not.
True. So all in all, the frequency of postings about one or the other is probably not an accurate reflection of what happens in the field
It is usually the same 5-10 people reporting these changes, people who are also active in the ethernet cable threads and audiophile switch threads etc. They can hear clear differences between:
and we’re generally not talking about subtle changes but clear and obvious ones, e.g.:
“I’m loving this version. I’m really enjoying greater stereo separation, more 3D like than the previous version i was on. The depth of bass is gorgeous. I could easily live with this version for a long time to come.”
I can’t say much about whether they are really able to hear these differences or not, but it appears to be a more or less distinct group of people who are involved in these threads. So either they:
(and yes i know, it’s usually also a distinct but different group of people who are critical of these claims 
)
There are also people who hear voices in their head 
Right, and that’s a real thing for some people as well, but the number of people posting about it on psychiatric self-help websites are also self-selected and not representative for the population at large. Such is the nature of all forums 
But there’s no reason to doubt such who observed a better sound.
Is there no reason to doubt someone who says they were abducted by aliens?
‘Saw a UFO’ is perhaps a better analogy.
The reason to doubt is that there is no known factual basis for a mechanism that would cause the large reported changes (as opposed to subtle ones - there is a known possible mechanism for those)
But in the context of the number of posts, I was only cautioning against taking the number of forum posts as representative for what the general population experiences. There may be a million Naim users out there who are not on the forum and maybe they all hear huge changes, or none of them do. But the number of forum posts is not a good indicator
How did you strike through? Been searching for this for ages and never figured out if it’s possible and how