Closed Source is a means to spur innovation. In exchange for teaching us what your do in a patent, you are granted exclusive use for a period of 17 years. That allows one to recover their sunk funds into R&D and hopefully use some of that money to make additional advances. (and that dirty word profits). By seeing what MQA is doing, perhaps someone else will get a brilliant idea to carry it further. I am sure Naim has lots of patents/closed source ideas and things that contribute to the Naim Sound and our enjoyment. If the cost/royalties are too high, someone will innovate around the patent and bring out the product/service/item for less money. Part of the capitalistic system.
The opposite is the case of Coca Cola. Its a secret recipe, and perhaps it has things in it that might be harmful. They have closed source Coke for dozens of years, kept the recipe in a vault, and stymied innovation.
Another bad thing about closed sourcing, like cables, interconnects, etc is that the manufacturer tells us why he thinks it works, and in fact many of these things are not scientifically based and are labeled snake oil, but many get taken in by them and waste their money.
So we do benefit from closed sourcing. Dolby, the CD, Cassettes, LP records, various noise reduction techniques many medicines, all were closed source and they helped us get to where we are.
At a more practical level, I know some people talked about doing tests like the ones you are trying to using various files produced by 2L Nordic Sound, either from their website or I think via their tracks on Tidal: e.g.: https://tidal.com/browse/artist/4945930
Best wishes
Jim
p.s. I just deleted my rant about the politics of MQA as it wasnāt helpful, and wasnāt on the topic of the thread.
I am finding that doing an A/B test is not really necessary, as I know my room and equipment well enough to hear the mqa coming thru very easily. Although I did not mention it in my prior post, a/b testing also requires the volume to be identical, which turns out not to the be easy. For me, if the difference in experience was not big enough to feel and hear in both casual and intense listening, then it was not for me. Fortunately, I did find that the experience was big enough for me. Now contemplating my next move.
Well, I listened to about 50 tracks yesterday that I know well and love - from extremely distorted tracks like āAnd the Gods Made Loveā by Jimi Hendrix to crystal clear electronic ones like when my son played āGet Luckyā by Daft Punk.
All the tracks were amazingly lifted up as regards SQ due to the dCS Network Bridge.
Mrs. Jimdog and I listened to about 7 tracks together, and the best ones by far in her and in my opinion were āMy Friend the Forestā and āA Placeā by Nils Frahm. New very subtle details of the recording were clearly audible, and the overall tone of all the music was the Naim sound, but brought out with wonderful clarity.
The Nils Frahm stuff was normal FLAC 44/16, as was Oscar Peterson āThe Bluesā, a JATP concert in the 50s which again was wonderfully lifted up.
But I listened to perhaps 5 or 6 MQA tracks, (I didnāt check the signal rate of all the tracks) and like you I felt these were mostly of an even more opened up enjoyable sound than the others.
But then Mrs. JD put on a track by Nirvana in MQA, and it sounded totally sterile - she noted this after about 40 seconds. Obviously this was becuase the MQA process had cleaned up the signals and the space between the instruments (or something like that) - but the music and the recording were designed to be messy and thrasy and merged and distorted. So we turned that quickly off.
This tiny sample of mine accords with what many MQA reports attest to, including those HMack on this forum - that overall the MQA process subjectively improves most tracks, but that sometimes it doesnāt and sometimes it makes it worse.
As regards your next move, Iām guessing that youāve got to decide which machine to get, and whether to return the MBB?
So that would point you towards other things, unless youāre happy with the MBB.
Like one Hegel amp - where they cram pre, power and MQA DAC into one box! Or the PS Audio DAC, which gets good reviews, but has a sheet of MDA glued to the top of it, and a nasty burn in process that can last 1000 hours making it impossible to get a stablized result in the time you have to sample it.
So itās a difficult choice.
FWIW, I believe the reports, including Hmackās that say that the 2nd unfold isnāt that impoirtant. Which is why I went down the road I did. But then what the heck do I know - Iāve never heard it!
But then I just remembered that you have an ND555. (Is this correct?)
That is a Roon endpoint, isnāt it? As well as being a super high end streamer and DAC by the best hifi company in the world.
So if you get a Roon Nucleus+, plug that in, download the Roon app., and Bobās your uncle, is he not?
That way you feed your super high end streamer and DAC with MQA Core Decoded files, DSD upsampling (I think?), various forms of DSP, convolution (!?) and room correction - plus a picture of the signal chain with bandwidths and speeds that will give you everything you need (bar the ā2nd unfoldā, which is peanuts by the side of all that).
[Disclaimer: this post is based on second-hand knowledge obtained via reading online, so you would want to check what I suggest with Roon and the Roon forums and the very clever people on this forum who know all about Roon like Sloop John B. et al.]
Your streamer was specifically designed to run Roon. So unless you give Roon a good shot, with a dedicated Roon core properly set up, youāll never what the 555 can do, as regards MQA and sound reproduction in general.
It seems that the older network card was to my ears a bit noisy, and that is the main improvement in the NDX2 and ND555
adding a DCS NB to a NDS should actually improve things quite a bit.
I did test this with a Naim qute which sounded absolutely fantastic when driven by an auralic streamer, but quite ordinary through itās own streaming board.
To my ears the streamer is also part of the āsourceā improve the streamer and Sq goes up a lot.
Hello JimDog
You are correct, I do have the ND555. I considered getting the Nucleus+ and just doing the first unfold. However, I decided to go for a solution that would do all 3 unfolds. I am not related to Rob nor Johnny nor Hiram (my last name is Walker).
That is the $64,000 question. Roon+555 with one unfold versus Other with 3 unfolds. Although in the early stages of this eval, and I had to go off to work for a few days, I can say that the Other with 3 unfolds is preferred to ND555 without any.
Like many on this forum, I was on the fence on which way to go, when a dealer made me an offer I could not refuse. The Nucleus+ was the other option I was contemplating.
I am off for the day to attend Daffodil Weekend, the old car parade, and festivities here on Nantucket Island in the US. I will see some classic MD TDās, US mussle cars, Model Aās and Tās, lots of woodies etc. Many goodies for food on the lawns of the old mansions in Siasconset. I will be manning the solar telescope, but it looks overcast. No sunspots or flares today.
Interesting thread and glad to hear you are getting on well with the DCS Bridge. A great bit gf kit. I noticed last night that one of my favourite albums of late is MQA encoded so iām interested in finding out a bit more about MQA (controversy aside) is doing. Iāve never been that concerned about format as mastering and recording quality make (IMHO) more difference, but iām interested in the signal path and what is going on and where when MQA encoding is present. A fine sounding album anyway.
I bow to Analogmusicās analysis re NDS.
The 272 is a beautiful piece of kit.
Thatās why I will keep and enjoy using it for many years, perhaps decades into the future.
The preamp alone is worth a large chunk of the Ā£3.7k RRP.
The DAC is excellent.
And Iāve been very happy with the streamer, even without adding a PSU (yet) - although I do intend to add a PSU when I next have some budget.
But replacing the 272ās built in (say very roughly Ā£1k) streamer with a Ā£3.2k streamer (i.e. the dCS Network Bridge) has worked extremely well for me.
The rationale is above - but the new source raises the performance of the 272, and saves it for me, because it adds 3 things - huge lift in SQ, MQA and Roon readiness.
(I personally wonāt be getting Roon any time soon but it may be useful down the line.)
Hi James
Hopefully a Roon expert can help you interpret that stream data flow chart.
Itās quite nice to see the readout on the dCS app that tells me the bandwidth and coding data of the file - but itās also nice to not worry about that.
Also, nice that the dCS app automatically picked up my favourite artists, tracks and albums from Tidal.
I agree that MQA is quite a small uplift relative to mastering and recording quality and the quality of the hardware in oneās system.
But listening to Max Roach āThe drum also waltzesā MQA in I think 192/24 last night with my eyes closed, it was as though the cymbals, hi hat, drums of Maxās drumkit were in my room and Max was sitting there playing it. Uncanny.
cheers
Jim
Excellent stuff Jim - great to hear that you are enjoying what it does. Itās also a great basis for the future if you decide to go in a different direction (it would probably make a great source for a Naim DACā¦)
I understand the Roon signal path - i was just interested in what MQA was doing as itās something that hasnāt really been on my radar and i was interested in reading more. Just found some articles in Stereophile to get me started so iāll pour myself a stiff drink and take a read
I see the point for a new streamer MQA,Roon, Qobuz etc .
Exactly for this reason I sold my 272 and bought a separate pre because, you can have an end game pre but not a end game streamer dac for a while, still I donāt have a streamer
adding DCS bridge to 272 seems to be a very expensive solution, with funds from 272 and Bridge you can buy a different brand pre/stremerā¦Cambridge, Moon or wait for the 372 before paying good money for DCS.
Maybe get a cheap solution from sotm can do the jobā¦ or I can advice you AK SP1000 as streamer, MQA and soon Roon end point as well, you can use it with headphones and on the go, this is what I am doing till I get a NDX2
with all due respect and not with a big deal of experience or golden ears my advice is to get rid of 272 and separate the source form pre , you will do it eventually
In this context and price class, it might also be worth looking at the Ayre QX-8. Itās a modular design and one can order it with or without network interface depending on the needs.
Generally speaking, I believe that it makes a lot of sense to have a device that takes care of intergrating UPnP, Roon, Airplay, Chromecast, Qobuz, Tital, etc. services in front of a DAC or outdated streamer.
On the other hand, the dCS NB (but also the QX-8 and similar devices discussed in this thread) are rather expensive and their usability crucially depends on how good or how bad their software is today and will be tomorrow. This is difficult to assess and estimate, as the case of the old Naim streamers demonstrates.
Thus, if I was to upgrade my source now, I would likely put most of my budget into a SPDIF or USB DAC that provides good isolation and rely on a dedicated NUC or RPi (perhaps with high quality interfaces) for intergrating UPnP, Roon, Airplay, Chromecast, Qobuz, Tital, etc. services.
Streamer for the streamer?
