Connecting a smartphone to a Naim pre for casual listening

I’m using an Arcam Miniblink to connect my iPhone to my 202 pre amp via Bluetooth and stream Spotify etc.

It works well enough for me never to consider replacing it with a streamer.

I would recommend discarding the supplied 3.5 mm to phono cable and replacing with a decent audiophile version as this improves things nicely.

We still use an Airport Express with a Nordost Heimdall iKable Mini-DIN interconnect to the 552. It sounds great. This solution is most of what my wife listens to for Pandora and Spotify.

Arcam miniBlink looks great, thanks for the suggestion. I’ll add it to the list. Their rBlink also looks interesting.

I see Airport Express is discontinued, yet still fairly widely available. I’ll check it out.

The WXC-50 does look good. I see a lot of detailed negative reviews on Amazon, which gives me pause, but perhaps they’re for more demanding situations than mine.

USB plug from iPhone to AQ Red and 3.5 to 2 RCA phono into amp a decent dac wired to your amp will be your best bet as connecting an iPhone to anything using its own internal dac will not sound good even for casual listening.

I bought one for my daughter a few years ago, and was surprised at how well it performed. In particular, setting it up with WiFi from a basic ISP supplied router, it just worked reliably every day. I then bought two little Yamaha wireless speakers for other rooms, and in quite a large house, they worked flawlessly, day in, day out, even with all 3 units in multiroom mode, from the same cheap nasty router which she shoved under a table in the hall on top of a pile of cables. Try doing that with the Naim equivalents, such as a 272 and two Muso QBs at ten times the price, and I would predict that you’d have a connectivity nightmare on your hands (albeit with hugely better sound quality when it did work) but perhaps we were just lucky.

I just bit the bullet and ordered a Yamaha WXC-50. Many thanks to all who contributed. I would likely have made a bad choice without your advice. :+1:

Hope you enjoy it.

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