The truth of this cannot be understated. Manchester encoding relies completely on time between two known endpoints. It is not an accident that other brands have some crazy expensive master clock generators so that a compatible CD transport, DAC, and streamer can all be fed off the same clock signal.
And as data rates increase, the importance of the clock accuracy and the cable become increasingly important. I remember a couple years back when I bought an early 4K monitor, none of my 5m long DisplayPort cables were certified for 4K data rate and guess what? They didnāt work. Getting a digital signal lock was very patchy. Attenuation was not letting a coherent stream arrive at the destination. Not unless the frequency was lowered or the cable replaced with a far more expensive one.
But this digresses from the thread to make a point. Streaming is no more or less reliant on a coherent data stream to the DAC than a CD player: it is equally vital to both.
Jim, the player is an Oppo UDP-205. Pop/rock SACDs I mostly get second hand, from Discogs, the Bay etc. Classical and jazz I buy new from places like Diverse or direct from the label.
I switched to streaming nine years ago, and sold my CD5 seven years ago. I havenāt owned a proper CD player since then.
Comparing replay of (ripped) CD content between CD5 and Linn Majik DS, I liked the DS much better. Both players were around 2500ā¬ at the time. I believe a CD player will probably be a noisier environment for a DAC than a streamer for the same amount of money.
Comparing CD and hi-res content, I usually prefer hi-res. Some hi-res albums do not sound better than CD but most do. In general Iād say CD material has a narrower soundstage and space around the instruments. Some of the early HDTracks albums were of dubious quality IMO. No complaints with downloads from Qobuz so far. SACD rips are often quite good. I havenāt tried DVD-A or BluRay rips yet.
Just because itās always an issue wrt streaming, I have to say, and will, that it has been YEARS since Iāve had any issues with reliability of getting my music to play when I want it to using home streaming. The Naim App these days is just fine; it always works for me.
We prefer Roon at home, which replaces the Naim app with its own app and replaces a standard UPnP server with its own server software. But the main advantage is that we prefer its User Interface.
Anyone avoiding the move from cd to home streaming because itās ātoo complicatedā or āunreliableā is cheating themselves. This is 2019, and itās neither. What CAN be unreliable is oneās home network. My home network has NOTHING esoteric; a netgear switch, Apple Airport Extreme, a QNAP nas, a Roon Nucleus, and a long run of cat 5 cable from my switch to my ND555 (and a very short run to my UnitiQute 2). Totally bog standard stuff, and it always works and sounds fabulous. And I never touch the stuff.
Bart: āWhat CAN be unreliable is oneās home network. My home network has NOTHING esoteric; a netgear switch, Apple Airport Extreme, a QNAP nas, a Roon Nucleus, and a long run of cat 5 cable from my switch to my ND555 (and a very short run to my UnitiQute 2). Totally bog standard stuff, and it always works and sounds fabulous. And I never touch the stuff.ā
The ND555, totally bog standard stuff @ 20K!
Just joking, but thanks itās 2019 and a large percentage of forum members havenāt made that move. Now Iāve been on hiatus for nearly two years and just recently returned. Well, the post havenāt changed, but Naim has taken the forums advice and released the ātotally bogā ND555!
And to my surprise DB has finally made the transition to streaming!
, thanks for sharing your rig, now I have the terminology to piece together what I need to make that transition.
One important question please!
Suppose I only wanted to stream locally, and rip my CD.
No iTunes, Roon, or Tidal!
Could this be done with a standard bog Uniti Core?
Of course I was referring to the network hardware not the never-bog-standard-Naim boxes! ha ha
I only stream locally, and Roon at itās core is just that - a replacement for local streaming via a UPnP server running on a nas or Mac etc. Roon will integrate with Tidal, but so will the Naim App.
I just feel that the Naim Core is very low on the value for money scale. Any numpty (am I using that term right?) can do what it does with a Nas or Roon Nucleus, and just a bit of patience to learn how to install software. Or maybe you have a tech savvy friend to do it with you the first time.
Bart continues to not recommend the Naim Core because of vfm and because it still will not convert your own rips to flac so that they can be used in the future on another system. That last piece SHOULD be fixed at some point, as its predecessor the UnitiServe did it . . . unless Naim do not want to do this for some reason.
MM
netgear switch
Apple Airport Extreme
3 x Airport Expresses
a QNAP nas ? ~ Network Player = ND555
Roon Nucleus ? ~ iTunes
cat 5 cable from my switch to my
ND555 Network player
(UnitiQute 2)? ~ MM Ripper??
Manchester Encoding or Phase Encoding is nothing really to do with timing between end pointsā¦ itās simply an encoding method that was originally setup to force transitions between successive identical values so as to help aid receiving synchronisationā¦ and thereby allowing the send clock to be superimposed on the data streamā¦ and prevents the clock ādriftingā or being smeared with respect to the serial link values. But any instability in the send clock will equally be recovered by the receiver, whether itās Manchester encoded or not. Effectively click instability will modulate the Mark / Space ratio of the Manchester Encoding.
Manchester encoding is used extensively in synchronous communications in many applications from Ethernet to SPDIF and is ideal for synchronous serial streamsā¦
Iāve got a few thousand cdās, a few hundred records, thousands of mp3 rips and tidal.
The reality is that I still use them all.
With regard to the cd vs hi-res debate, if I have the choice of tidal or cd from my collection Iāll just play whatever sounds best or is most convenient at the time. When I used the Naim app for tidal streaming on my Superuniti, I was a little disappointed with the sound. Since I moved to Bubbleupnp Iām a loads happier.
If Iām really fond of something new, Iāll generally buy the cd or lp format at some point but I find the sq difference in cd and tidal for new stuff is narrowing nowadays and Iām just purchasing so I can physically own something.
Further muddling the water, some CD player actually buffer the songs and playback frkm memory, and most Dacs do this during reclocking.
Playing CDs is like ripping a minute in advance of playing and then deleting it.
The Quality of the transport, the amount of timing error or the amount of noise carry forward seems to be the current focus of manufacturers.
As for Hires vs CD, the designer of Chord seems to believe the number of bits matter less as his top end M scalar can barely meet the 1,000,000 taps required for 16 bit playback, but increase in sampling frequency is likely to matter more as it enable better timing.
However theory is theory and it is only generalization. Listening is the beat. It could well be your system sound better at 16bit44khz. There can be infinite number of reasons such as your transport/dac doesnt handle the required increase in clock sample as good? or perhaps increase in frequency increase processing load and switching noise?or your system is optimised for 16/44 because letās face it, that is like 99.9% of the music you can.actually find and playā¦
The net gain/loss in any particular system can only be judged by our own ears. Sometimes itās even just preference and not better/worst I guess.
As for the ritual of playing CD/LP, I think.it Iād a casr.of the Skinners experiment on conditioning. You ring a bell then feed a dog. Sooner or later the dog starts drooling as soon as it hear a bell and gets pleasure, even though it is the food that is supposed to give it pleasure, but not the bell?
In the context of our systems and personal experience:
I have many ripped CDs which sound fantastic. I have one which sounded better than any HiRes version of the album I own (which is all of them), until the last release, which included flat transfers, that sound breathtakingly good in 24/96.
Part of the issue is that it is difficult to compare like with like. By the time something gets into a 24bit or DSD format, it will have likely been messed about with along the way. These balls ups are often referred to as remasters. It is remarkable how many producers, engineers and artists either have defective hearing or just donāt care about sound quality, particularly the benefits of a good dynamic range.
As a kind of rule of thumb, but not strictly, more complex material tends to benefit from HiRes. Since I play a lot of Classical and Prog, the apparent ability of 24/48/96/192 to decode and coherently present more information, might be because it suits my kind of music particularly well. But this doesnāt universally apply.
As for the question of what is better? That is in the ear of he beholder. It took one afternoon in the company of a prototype HDX, along site a CDX2 to convince Helen that streaming sounded preferable, and to convince me to bring the HDX home for a long audition when it finally launched. We were both early (in the Naim universe) converts. If we couldnāt hear what all the fuss was about, we would be running a CD555 now, rather than our ND555. If you canāt hear an advantage in streaming versus CD playback, you are fortunate. You will stay richer for longer.
Streaming isnāt complicated. Itās as complicated as people want to make it. Tagging isnāt complicated either. Like anything from vinyl onward, streaming presents challenges, benefits and pitfalls like any other format. Use the one you like best and donāt assume that everyone listens with your ears.
What are you trying to say hereā¦ you have mixed up several different engineering aspects ā¦
The size of the filter response kernel in terms of amount of time it operates over determines the number of samples or ātapsā it contains. This time filter function is called a Window Function (Or sometimes called the appodisation function) and is a Window that the sample stream passes through. It is specific to the FIR reconstruction method ā¦ which is just one of the two main implementation options. Naim use the other method which works differently, the IIR reconstruction method as they believe with their architecture and components it subjectively sounds better. There are certain popular window functions such as the Hanning Window function and the Blackman Window function for FIR reconstruction. Rob Watts I believe uses his own Window function algorithm.
The size of the Window function in terms of time (and effectively the number of ātapsā) is specific to the method and algorithm used. The Blackman Window function specialises in minimising the amount of time required by the Window function; that is the number of ātapsā or the filter response kernel can be reduced in size.
The Window function used by Rob Watts goes the other and extends the time window of the filter responseā¦ hence he needs a largefilter kernel or many ātapsā in his designā¦ but that is specific to his designā¦ to give a subjective pleasing outcome ā¦ itās not universally required and a Window function with many less taps perhaps using a Blackman Window function may subjectively give better results to other individuals.
Remember digital to analogue conversion is a compromise, so you focus on those areas in the conversion that are subjectively the most important to you. Now for me I happen to focus on sound the same way as it would appear Rob Watts does, so I enjoy some of his DACsā¦ but not necessarily everyone will.
BTW with respect to discrete interaural timing elementsā¦ increasing the sample rate to capture it without increasing the sample resolution is unlikely to yield good results in real world scenarios in my opinion.
CD at 44.1kHz has a resolution of 22 uS. I understand hearing studies have shown that some people can reliably process interaural resolution of 15uS for certain low frequency soundsā¦ and there are some views that for certain frequencies some people can resolve down lowerā¦ note this is nothing to do with hearing frequency range.
What I meant is that our hardware is just about to only exhaust the limits of the CD formats, after 3 decades. Hi Res doesnt beat CD for now is not surprising for now. 3 decades later maybe our system will exhaust all digital sound formats. But not at this point in timeā¦
Ok, but I really donāt think most hardware is near the limits of exhausting most of CDā¦ especially when you consider loudspeakersā¦ which in the grand scheme of things in real rooms are hugely compromised (in my opinion)
I agreeā¦ though to an earlier post does depend on recording.
However it never ceases to surprise me how good some CD can soundā¦ 44.1/16/2 can sound so realistic.
And letās not forget 16/44.1 is only one half of things. Thereās doubtless improvements to be made in recording, mastering, and possibly (or possibly not) encoding.
I think itās more a case of bad habits being unlearned. Listen to some good quality recordings made in the 1950s. Not much more to learn from these.
With the ND555 now fronting our system, we can hear information coming out of ripped CDs which we did not know was there. Songs we thought we knew. Songs that weāve been listening to for most of our lives. Whilst the 16/44 format has its limitations (many of which were known and argued over before Sony and Phillips decided to use it as the reference base), and while it cannot do things that higher resolutions seemingly can, there is no reasonable basis to assume that CD has nothing more to give. Who knows how much more is in there? Maybe if we get a Statement Streamer we will find out. Or find out some of it.
Like for like, I prefer HiRes. The problem is that it is very difficult to ascertain if what you are listening to in 24bit is identical source material to what you listen to in 16bit.
, thanks for sharing your rig, now I have the terminology to piece together what I need to make that transition.