Yeah okay Iāll accept that. 
Me neither, Iām now doing same old stuff and terribly bored - therefore spilling too much time on this forum. Need something impossible to do.
Which is correct but there must be a bloke around who keeps the younglings on track.
By the way, are you at that big bank at the railway station? Iāve spend many years there as well as their offices in Zeist.
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Wow, controversial thread with a very aggressive starting point.
For me yes, the original app was a bit flaky, but now does everything I need it to reliably (Android supporting ND5XS)
The software game is an interesting one, I have been working in IT for 40 years in various roles, but have never been a programmer. I can understand some code and hack together a simple scripts, but that is it.
Writing code is is a time to market, cost and quality balance. The one key factor for most software is that it can be fixed after release, which is both a good and bad thing. Compare this to something like civil engineering, where itās not easy to re-engineer a bridge after its been built.
I currently work managing a support team for a US company. There can be struggles with quality and attitudes of the people writing the code. We definitely have some prima donnas who want to just write new features not fix old bugs. Just do it properly in the the first place thenā¦ The modern trend is for the programmer to write their own test routines, but that assumes that they fully understand the specification in the first place. A lot of QA tends to ātest for passā rather than ātest to failā which is basically try an get the product out of the door with minimal testing as opposed to running all scenarios that the code could encounter. This is in reality necesary to get features out ahead of the competition. The downside of this is that customers are the real QA and find many of the issues. The marketplace I work in is quite bleeding edge and there is a degree of acceptance of this approach. I had a issue a few weeks back where a stupid behavior in the code resulted in a significant outage for one customer. This was addressed in a good time and the customer attitude was ābugs happen, just make sure you learn from the incidentā which was surprisingly reasonable.
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Couldnāt disagree more.
Heads up, confession time. I write s/w, have done for nearly 30 years. And Iām no good at it. I understand it, Iāve written some fancy apps and processes and been very successful in my career in various roles that involve production support, client facing support & development, data design, and am now working on the company web site. Iām v good at SQL as a language, wrote some fancy stuff when VB & then VB.Net was all the rage and have got my head around C#, but the concepts and means of implementing it have left me behind since my last but one job ended a few years ago. I can work on other peopleās code but ask me to write something from scratch using factories, bootstraps and all that and Iāll fail. But I donāt mind, as long as I know enough to be a bit chameleon and implement required solutions.
Itās enabled me in conjunction with my OH to provide us with a very nice lifestyle and for our kids to grow up not having to wonder whether itās new clothes or meals some weeks and for that alone Iām thankful. I couldnāt have achieved this in any another discipline that might have been open to me so the happy pay off for both sides is that I do a quite good job even though Iāve no great interest beyond personal pride in making a decent fist of it, and in return Iām well paid. And I know Iām not alone - Iāve worked with and managed coders who donāt quite get it, but we always got the job done and still do.
Having to be passionate about your job is a luxury for most, and the pay that comes with this one more than makes up for it when I can buy an ND555 on a whim or take a helicopter flight on holiday as a spur of the moment thing. Etcā¦
Money makes the world go round. Iāll prioritise that all day long over being in a massively contentful job that doesnāt pay as long as there are people for whom I have a responsibility.
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Well weāre not talking about what would be best for you and your wallet obviously, but what would be best for Naim as a brand.
I donāt see much in your reaction that makes me think āYes this is a really good argument why Naim should look for people who are primarily in it for the moneyā. On the contrary perhapsā¦
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I think this thread raises a number of questions about brand, how consumers identify with a brand in terms of its value and how it sits relative to the multitude of competing alternatives.
Naim has and continues to rely in part on its heritage, the legacy of itās creators and a commitment to a singular view of how audio products should be built.
What I would hope, given all the ownership changes in recent years, is that they continue to have strong thought leadership and are allowed to be in control of the road ahead from a product and technology perspective.
At some point Naim will need to evolve to survive and to remain competitive. They wonāt survive on fixing 30 year old power amps and antique CD players alone.
There is an increasing argument that you can have a really good 2 channel HiFi system that doesnāt take up half your living room and require 20 AC mains sockets just to listen to the radio.
Many will cling on to what they know and glorify the past, whilst the industry as a whole will adapt and evolve and productise in a way that benefits consumers, their profitability and has a more positive impact from a supply chain and manufacturing perspective.
Software is and will be increasingly important in the future in terms of the consumer proposition certainly as digital and in particular streaming becomes the primary means of consumption. The interface to the product and to an extent the brand is the app on your phone. You can have a very expensive source like an ND555 and yet the experience is defined and expectations set to an extent by the app you use to control the very expensive and capable black box the other side of the room.
This thread highlights the fact that itās not just about how good it sounds or the aesthetics in a residential setting, the software plays a key role in setting the scene and establishing your relationship with the brand.
Having owned multiple mid to high end brands and different levels of integration and separation in system setup, Iād say Naim are neither the worst nor the best. Every software implementation has its shortcomings, some solved over time, others never really put to bed.
Consumers now have a world of choice and access to libraries of content that were well beyond the reach of an average consumer only a few years ago. Most of us have embraced change and evolved to encompass digital streaming in our systems, however that brings with it a lot of additional setup complexity and granularity that are hard to quantify entirely.
I would say that my experience of dealing with Naim, either directly or via my dealer has always been exceptional, and where problems arose, and Iāve had a few over the years, they made it their priority to resolve them and return me to a state of happiness.
Because even though personally itās just a means to an end, that doesnāt mean that what I eventually create is no good.
The idea that s/w is more art than science isnāt always a good one. The way s/w development has evolved has made it much more of a formal discipline esp where serious number crunching is involved, and being right is more important than an unusual but elegant new way of doing something thatās been done before and already fulfils its primary purpose. Improve and increase efficiency by all means, but that doesnāt contradict being motivated more by money than an enthusiasm for coding.
Anyway, I was responding to the point that money shouldnāt be the primary motivator.
I think Naim more or less has resolved your identified issues with the muso and unity lines, combining sq with what we used to call WAF in the old days. With the support for airplay chromecast spotify and tidal direct and bluetooth for the nonimportant easy listening. and Roon on the current streaming platform most people can do most of the controlling of a Naim setup without using the app itself.
After having owned a bluesound Node for a few years I will say that I am not going to buy a streaming setup without most of these streaming posibilities supported.
Claus
Same here but in Europe. I could have written the same things, probably not as eloquently.
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If they employ new software engineers, I sincerely hope that they will put them to task to sort out the software issues with the Nova.
My system was turned off, but nevertheless a moment ago my wife and I were startled by a high pitched sound like a loud bang from my loudspeakers followed by a āmechanicalāsound from the Nova.
Apparently it is having a fit or a sporadic software update.
My patience is running low with this āthingā at the moment and I cannot see myself getting anything new from Naim when the time comes to upgrade my system.
ā¦ā¦and after āthe sporadic software updateā the volume level on the screen has disappeared again!
What can I sayā¦.
(However, I am currently listening to Bruce Springsteen āHuman Touchā and I must admit that it sounds just rightā¦.)
A report in yesterdayās Times on improvements to the British armyās Challenger 3 tank made me think of this thread. Apparently it has a new suspension system improving its accuracy at hitting a target, even when moving, at up to 60mph.
Now there is a mechanical engineering and software problem, I thought!
Back to Naim, Roy George type minds, except in software, is my hope.
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Well luckily Naim donāt have any plans to build a tank.
Though they might have a project to migrate Naim for Bently to one.
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āNaim for M1 Abramsā
Challenger 3 surely?
True!
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