Listening now to Tidal max through the Naim app
My ND5XS2 sounds amazing. So no need for the Roon hassle anymore? No Qobuz in my region. Still exploring the new Naim Radio.
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Each to their own, but beyond me why anyone would pay 830 bucks for roon.
Martin
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It’s somehow acquired a ‘must have’ factor. The tag ‘Roon Ready’ seems to have been a marketing coup, for some reason.
I got it back in the day when I got my Star around 2019 and using the Naim app caused it hang almost daily. Solved that and was a nice way to collect tracks from different source and it did the first MQA unfold.
Now I have unsubscribed from Qobuz and using Tidal alone. I cannot try ink of a reason I’d go through the trouble of running a Roon server at home anymore. Especially since they forced you to be online even to listen to your local files.
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To be fair, I think recent versions of Roon allow for local access without Internet.
I still think the pricing is a rip-off for what it offers.
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Did not know that. When I cancelled my sub was when they just decided you needed to always be online and open up your home network to the world for the travel option 
Lyrion (formerly Logitech Media Server) does pretty much what Roon does, and is open-source, free & runs on a wide range of PCs (raspi, Linux, Windows, Android).
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As I don’t have tons of own files, Tidal Connect with the Tidal App gives me everything I ever used in Roon back then.
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100% agree! The latest update sounds amazing IMHO.
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I don’t use the Tidal App but how does it connect to your Atom? Does ChromeCast do the connection? I’m just curious.
With Tidal Connect. Get full hi res there too and control via the Tidal App.
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Just listened to Neil Diamond love on the rocks on Tidal. Max 24bit 192khz is soooooooooo much better than the 16bit 44.1khz version it’s astounding.
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Interesting to hear that. High praise indeed! Can we assume you compared the two versions back to back? What difference was most noticeable?
Sorry if i missed this but do i need to update my NDS?
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I dont know if my ears are deceiving me but has Naim improved the dac output on the ND5XS2 with this latest release?
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I think so as well. My ND5XS2 outputting to my nDAC has never sounded better.
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Yeah there’s something going on for the better
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We did wonder as well, but having been in our holiday home for a week and the system powered off we thought perhaps just expectation bias with the new firmware and restart.
System is certainly sounding fantastic HiRes or not.
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Interesting, certainly with the Uniti series and related sources there used to be a lot of debate about the sonic attributes of various firmware releases.
There was quite an old one which I really preferred due to a fuller more analogue sound on the Nova (maybe some would say coloured but I liked it).
It didn’t have native Qobuz support or Roon’s RAAT engine so I ended up with newer versions, but can’t remember any recent discussions on sound quality.
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Maybe it’s just those of us who output from our streamers to an external DAC that have noticed this more. I primarily use Roon/Qobuz. Not Tidal ‘yet’, love the Internet Radio on the Naim app
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