How difficult would it be for Naim to produce a CD player in a similar sized case to the Core ?
And on another point…why / what was the reasoning behind not letting the Core play as well as rip .
Probably best addressed to head office, Steve, in an email!
Naim said some time ago that they would keep making CD players as long as people kept buying them. When demand dropped, they discontinued them. Not much more to it than that, really.
Yeah I like the idea of the Core being able to play a CD just for those occasions when someone brings a CD round.
It’s just the aesthetics for me… the Cd5si looks a little out of place with the Nova and Core… the Unitiserve could “ play” so why the change with the Core ?
Having peered into the Core, its pretty much packed out , so the idea of a quality analogue output as a cd player in this size box is pretty difficult…at Naim SQ standards. Still a market for cd players, albeit smaller than it was, hopefully Naim will surprise us all.
Steve, the Unitiserve was similar to the Core. You had to rip the CD first to play it. It did not ‘play’ CD’s.
I know this is an old chestnut, but considering the interest in vinyl I’m amazed Naim don’t do at least a couple of runs of the Aro again.
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Actually that’s not true. The Unitiserve could indeed play a CD without ripping it first.
Best
David
Naim could output a digital signal rather than an analogue signal…
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David
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I asked Trevor Wilson when he was MD why Naim stopped making CDX2. He said it wasn’t lack of demand, but rather they could no longer get mechanisms of the required quality and they wanted to keep those they had in stock so that they could service CDX2s that may come back during their lifetime.
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David
For the CDX2, yes, I believe that was the reason given. Even then, if they had been flying out the door, I think you can be sure they would have found a way to keep then going.
Phew…thought I was loosing it !
The Serve could play CDs without ripping but only had a digital output via coax. So you needed a dac for it to work and it wasn’t a stand-alone player. There are quite a few things the Serve could do that the Core can’t. I imagine that the majority of users didn’t use these features hence the decision to drop them.
Maybe that, but I think another reason is that US was an early product and so capability got added in to make it more widely useable and because at that stage streamers were few and far between. Now Naim more clearly allocates tasks to different units. The Core is a network ripper/server and secondly a hard disc player, so no CD playing, internet radio or streaming of Tidal etc.
But some things were used widely and haven’t been included, like on the fly transcoding for example. And the metadata editing in Core is still very compromised compared with Unitiserve. Personally I suspect that the developers never need to edit composers or conductors because they don’t listen to classical music or rip classical CDs, so they simply don’t understand the point.
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David
And optical …which is what I recall using.
Yes indeed. I forgot that.
IIRC a certain parts could only be purchased in the kind of numbers that made no sense considering the small number of Aros that were being sold.
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As the owner of a CDX2 I am pleased it can still be serviced. We forget Naim do buy in materials (and that seems a weakness of some of their more computer orientated machines) but I would love to see a half size CD transport to go with the Unit range or a digital output on the basic CD player .
Naim produce a helluva lot of machines with digital inputs and there are an awful lot of CDs out there.
Since moving to storing my music on a hard drive over six years ago I’ve never felt the need to play a CD. With the Unitis being streaming products there seems little reason why Naim might make a matching CD player.