Sticking with the NDX for now limits the DAC options and features that you can use straight away. Away from the Naim DAC you are likely to find USB and other connections from alternative manufacturers that you can’t yet evaluate?
Waiting patiently as well for the price of whisky to drop…
For a while I had a great streamer/DAC combo from Metrum Acoustics in the shape of the Ambre/Pavane.
The designer of those products is currently making a new integrated Roon Ready streamer/DAC under the name of Sonnet Digital Audio which, if and when it hits the market, will cost around 1K and probably equal if not better the quality of the 6K combo.
Leaving 3,500 free (after purchasing a Roon lifetime licence) for other upgrades or music purchases.
The Musical Fidelity M1 also received top marks by Stereophile but it sounded way broken when compared to the Chord QBD76. It was immediately sold when I got the Chord into the system.
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I prefer them separate. I have anti-delta-sigma flags in my DNA - every spring I need to go to a special NOS-retreat.
Why do you say that?
Both DSD and MQA decoding is perfectly fine with a separate transport and DAC
I had TEAC DAC I could switch to NOS mode. It sounded terrible when I did. In other modes it sounded quite good. I’d say comparable with Naim’s DAC. It used Burr Brown DAC chips.
Pulse Array DACs or MASH type DACs sound the most musical to me. I used to like Philips DAC7.
Everybody needs to listen for themselves as there is no obvious consensus.
Using an NDX as the transport surely limits the high res native DSD and MQA options as there is no USB interface?
No problem with MQA up-to 192/24 framing, but DSD limited to DSD64 framed as DoP… which is not too much of an issue in my experience.
So USD rate weakens, you pay more. USD rate strengthens, you pay more. If you can get a way with it, that’s a good policy. Wish we could get away with that in our company!
It’s nearly am impossible question to answer. Separating transport and DAC does give more flexibility in terms both matching DAC to user preference and allowing for easier changes to content access as things change on the front end. Not to mention simply segregating functions that can potentially pollute each other with RFI or different demands on the power supply.
But separating them out also causes a whole set of different problems. One of the reasons Naim stuck to transport-DAC combined CD players was because they felt the gains made by separating a transport and a DAC were less than the drawbacks in other others. Signal clocking being a prime issue. Combine everything and everything can run off the same clock. Issues with jitter and messy solutions like master clock links between devices are largely eliminated.
To some degree this is still true with streamers, but arguably less so. In my view, with their digital inputs, a streamer is in fact more like a classic DAC 2.0 than a new type of source, with network connectivity just being another digital input type. In some countries you never see the word “streamer” but “network DAC” instead, which I think is more accurate.
Now the grey area comes where these devices can in fact be used entirely as a DAC or entirely as a transport. Which is completely fine, but we need to be clear, none of these devices is one where you could say the streaming board or the DAC was an afterthought. They were intended for integrated use from the outset.
Given that I look at a streamer and just see a DAC regardless of what other’s think, I’d be more likely to go for an all in one transport+DAC. And if I wanted to upgrade, more likely to find a new streamer than bolt on a new DAC. To me that almost feels like adding a DAC to a DAC.
Ultimately though it is all a moot point. If I found a DAC I preferred and it had no streaming board, I’d find a dedicated transport to marry it to and make the solution work for me. Just saying that if all things were equal (which they aren’t always), I go for a combined solution.
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The transport in a streamer DAC is as important as the quality and accuracy of its analogue reconstruction.
Therefore I strongly recommend you don’t skimp on transports… Naim in my opinion make some of the best transports currently out there… like the NDX2 and ND555… yes it’s diminishing returns… but in the latest streamers the transport was the area of most innovation and advancement and a significant improvement over the earlier Naim streamers.
Therefore I say NDX2 as a transport (though some on here use a ND555 as a transport) and the DAC you prefer.
Naim use the SPDIF format for linking to DACs, yes whilst ultimately bandwidth relatively limited to 192/24/2 transport framing, has the potential of being lower noise than USB that some other DACs use.
In my experience (and through my applied engineering theory and practice) there can be significant merit in system decoupling the DAC from the transport… now although Naim go to a significant extent to internally shield in the ND555, there will be benefit in the limit to separate.
You will find with decoupled DAC / transport the effects of Ethernet tweaks like Ethernet/streaming leads, FLAC vs WAV, ethernet switches etc all start to have much less of an impact… especially with the new Naim revised architecture streamer transports… which to my mind is how it should be… and leads to a more deterministic performance.
Now with the new streamers some argue that not using its inbuilt default DAC is a waste… well i suspect it’s not economic for a Naim to do two variants, so they combine a model that can work in either mode… specifically the streamer is designed to be internally configured as digital transport mode or analogue mode but not both… and in some ways disabling the inbuilt DAC is no more a ‘waste’ than disabling the internal PSU when an external PSU is used for the NDX2 for example… these are all implementation choices.
One obvious advantage of using a Mac mini as a transport is its versatilely. If there is a new service you want to use then it is much more likely to available on a Mac mini than on a dedicated transport.
I find a Mac mini as good as a dedicated transport if you connect it through a suitable box to your DAC. I find Chord’s Blu 2 highly suitable, but the much cheaper M Scaler is almost as fine.
My personal preference is the transport/dac solution - synergies. I had the (1) 272 and (2) SoTM sms-200 Ultra Neo and Chord Qutest feeding the 252/SCDR. Much preferred the SQ from 272 and have since ordered the NDX2 which I am eagerly waiting for delivery. Besides the SQ, it’s a much tidier setup as compared to separates. With separates, there are too many variables that may influence the SQ. Nevertheless, with separates, you’ll have the satisfaction of putting together what suits your taste.
Personally I think a separate transport is good as it is evolving much faster than your Dac. Marrying them together you will have a tough choice especially when the Dac is doing what you want…
As for Naim transport, does it support DSD? Does it support USB for those Dac that has it?
Naim transports support DSD, AAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, ALAC, WAV, FLAC, SPDIF and RAAT.
The digital output is via SPDIF as opposed to USB for optimum noise control… so if you have a USB only DAC you will need took for an appropriately matched transport elsewhere.
having the transport separate makes sense if you expect media services to be a more active market with, for example, local services for different parts of the world.
the DAC is more like the cart on a record player and you want to choose. Delta-sigma has its timing/transient problem. NOS sound fantastic but has other drawbacks. Multibit is also musical and great but expensive to build. All resons to keep the DAC separate.
And if we are speaking of digital interfaces then my recent experiences is that AES/EBU more often than not turns out to be the best in terms of SQ.
How true. Though I prefer an integrated product, if you are somewhere that has very backwards digital broadcasting laws, you may find your new streamer with support for various services is basically limited to vTuner and a reduced library Spotify. This is true where I am. There’s not much of anything. Streamers are sort of popular where I am but with no Quboz, Tidal etc. the expectation is purely that you’ll do Airplay from your phone or local UPnP. Needless to say, sales of CD players here haven’t dropped off yet, nor have big stores like HMV or Tower Records.
So yeah, I concede that in that respect, it is simpler and more cost effective to get a dedicated DAC and whatever transport is suitable. Especially if you are somewhere where service offerings have stagnated/moving backwards.
That I suspect is going to be implementation specific, as the various AES3 interfaces (Cat 5 through to Coax) use the same serial Protocol (with some flag differences) but use different electrical characteristics to suit different transmission media/ cabling requirement and cable length.
AES3id uses 75 ohm coax and BNC for example and can drive 1000m whilst SPDIF formally uses RCA and drives upto 10m… although again the electrical properties are different, but the transport protocol mostly the same.
You can take an SPDIF or AES3id output and connect to an AES3 input with suitable cabling… the other way you can’t do without attenuators as the voltage levels are too high.
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