HDX repair

This is my first post here and I have enjoyed reading the discussions.
I bought a second hand hdx for £1000 a few years ago. It was working great but broke down and was fixed by my excellent Nottingham retailer. When it broke down again they said they could not fix it, and enquired of NAIM who said it would be £800 which seems a lot. Do people think this is worth it? Is there anyone else who could repair it (I tried a few online adverts but they said they couldn’t)
Philip

What exactly is wrong with it? I mean what are the symptoms?

Naim does charge a vast amount to repair and service an HDX. It’s almost certainly not worth it. The HDX, lovely though it is, is totally obsolete and if you are in the UK then I doubt that you will find anyone else able to do it, although I understand a few of the top Naim dealers have invested in the capability to do many of the more common repairs, like changing an HD for example.

But if it were me, then I would buy a UnitiCore (I did buy a UnitiCore!), but many here will tell you to buy a NAS instead or to buy a ripper/server from a third party.

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Indeed, I have ripped my CD collection, stored on a large SSD, backed up twice on two servers, one of which is not in this house. My streamer is a Roon (other server software is around) based NUC, and my music is on a second SSD within the NUC. My music is backed up to a mechanical NAS drive.

If you can access the music stored on the HDX, I’d go down a different route. There are other formats that perform better than PCM, thinking about DSD personally, which Roon will convert a PCM file too on the fly. However, native DSD is far better. It is interesting how a popular ripping utility now gives the option of DSD ripping.

Or, save yourself a lot of hassle. Don’t bother ripping anything, just stream from Qobuz.

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Until your broadband supplier can’t be bothered to come out and fix for 3 weeks or so….happened to me twice. Now with a new supplier….but my Qobuz only dream was some what shattered. I post while listening to Qobuz which is brilliant.

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I bought my HDX new, for a heck of a lot more than £1000
I’ve now owned it for around 9 years.
If it were to fail now, I’d probably not bother getting it repaired if it were going to cost £800
I feel I’ve probably had my money’s worth from the unit.
As I’ve ripped all of my CD’s and only occasionally buy or receive as gifts CD’s these days, I’d simply use my existing QNAP / Synology NAS drives and rip using dBpoweramp on my computer.
I should add that I also have an NDX2, so streaming, iRadio etc. are all handled by that these days. My HDX has simply become a ripper/storage unit anyway.

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I’ve ripped a lot of my CD’s, I am re-ripping them using dBpoweramp to DSD, a DSD stream will leave a CD PCM encoded file sound soulless in comparison, you need a proper DSD DAC though, a DAC that implements DSD by converting it to PCM is not the same. It leaves me thinking which chip Naim will use when all stocks of the now discontinued DAC they use run out?

Usual failure mode of the HDX is the system HDD (one of the two drives in the 2 drive versions or the sole HDD in the one drive version). It shouldn’t cost anywhere near £800 to replace those.

What exactly needs fixed in your HDX - the main board?

That’s as maybe, but that is the fixed charge that Naim make for a repair and service of an HDX.

It’s not simply a case of “replacing the drive(s)” but the time taken to not only install the OS onto the drive(s) but, I believe, the paring of said drive(s) to the mother board. Not a simple swapping over of the drive(s).
It’s old tech and the suitable drives are allegedly scarce too.
You pay your money and take your choice.

There’s no “pairing of drives to the motherboard”, just cloning the OS to a new HDD and installing. The HDDs are in plentiful supply, its the SLC SSD drives that are no longer available.

There was an earlier post by Stevesky on a similar subject which suggested otherwise.
(1000 Dollars for an hard drive? - #59 by Stevesky)

I can speak from experience. I had an NS02 back in the day basically an hdx without the display and in my ownership I cloned the 500gig drive, bit by bit to an SSD. It appeared to work for a little while but soon failed, nothing wrong with the drive, I reformatted it and put it to other uses and tried another one, same story after a while.

My assumption (and remains) that the SSD trim was not supported and I was pushing my luck. I never tried cloning a rust spinner to rust spinner but what I can say is years later I saw the instructions for installing a new drive and its complicated. You get one chance to marry the drive to the motherboard, and if you screw it up the drive has to be reformatted and image reapplied, simply cloning an existing one does not seem as fool proof as it appears.

Nower days I prefer to keep audio devices from audio companies and servers from IT companies. This is working out far far better.

I think that’s simply a case of taking the device name when the drive is set up - not “pairing” in the traditional sense, but rather taking a few bits of info from the setup device.

NAIM take care of all this when the clone the software onto the new drive but without their system setup routines, you might be left with a working device, just with the wrong device name.

Having said that, £800 or $1000 still seems a little steep for the repair costs.

Thanks to everyone for their comments on my original post. It gets stuck loading up and my local shop said they can’t fix it. It looks like it’s not worth getting it fixed.

How long have you left it in the “loading” state?
Mine was once stuck like that for hours on end and I took it for repair. My dealer plugged in an external PC screen and saw that it was actually re-indexing the files on the drive, which took over 24 hours if I remember correctly.

While I’m appalled at the fixed repair price, I must confess that I would pay it to get my HDX back in A1 working condition for the next 5 years.

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