Hires audio streams on Gen 1 devices?

[Kurt]

I often read some posts dealing with FLAC hires radio streams on Gen 1 devices not working. Well, no, no and no, Naim doesn’t support it, and will never do it for Gen 1 devices.

Having a ND5 XS myself, this was also my challenge somewhere early 2021. I contacted Naim Support, but never got an answer. Being myself in IT I started exploring this; the solution is “Forward Proxy” (FWP). The long story you can read HERE and HERE. My written documentation is not 100% up to date, but it gives an idea about the approach.

If you want to skip the Tech reading, there’s good news! YES, your Gen 1 devices perfectly support Hires audio streams! But It requires some plumbing via vTuner…

There’re 2 FWP instances providing the hires streams:

• Phoenix instance: IP address: 129.146.133.23
• Frankfurt instance: IP address: 158.101.168.33

Based on your location, choose the most appropriate. Let’s call the one you choose as FWP_ADDRESS. So, if you’re in the EU, IP_ADDRESS should be 158.101.168.33, but if you’re in sunny Cali or Arizona, your IP_ADDRESS should be 129.146.133.23. If you’re in between do a “ping” with both IP addresses to figure out the lowest response time.

What stations does FWP support? Easy, just hit “http://FWP_ADDRESS:9001/fwp/stations” (yes – http, not https)

Got there? See the “Path” column? Right. For all stations It’s the same approach: in vTuner, add a custom radio station in the following format: http://FWP_ADDRESS:9000/Path (not https!)

So, if you want to hear for example the Naim Jazz HD stream on your Gen 1 device in the EU, just add the following entry in vTuner as “station URL”: http://158.101.168.33:9000/naim_jazz

Note that this is an open source project, running on a free Oracle Cloud instance. You can also run it at home (as I do). Sources are HERE. So, I don’t make any money out of it, but also no warranties. Having said that, the infrastructure has been up and running without interruption since March 2021, 24/7.

I listen myself every day to HD streams via FWP on multiple devices. In case of bugs, I (try to) fix it. But to be honest, the “core” sound processing engine has not undergone that many fixes, as this was quite stable from day 1. Latest minor bug wrt the sound engine dates from 26 Jan 2022 on version 7.2. So…

If questions, drop me a mail.

Best,
Kurt

[IainO]

With the source you have made available it’s reasonably easy for anyone with tech skills to stand up a FWP instance (proxy) on their own home network to provide streams to legacy devices such as 272, but without the dependence on the cloud service.

We did exactly that, first on a Ubuntu laptop and later on a virtual machine running on our Synology NAS. Would be reasonably easy to run in a container too. We tried it on a PI as well and it worked great.

Many thanks for all your work on this project.

We now have an NDX2 in main system, but our use of FWP lives on with our office SuperUniti.

[Kurt]

Thank you!
To be honest, when I add or modfiy something, I always test it first in the Cloud, next on my PI at home.
It makes me happy to see what FWP could bring a “second life” to devices being declared “end-of-life” by Naim. Tonight I enjoyed for example the superb sound quality of the Super Stereo 7 Jazz channel. This is 24 bit @ 96 kHz!
If you run it at home, it may require some testing with the buffersize and the number of buffers, based on what your internet provider delivers, but at the end it proves your gen 1 device can stll deal with the streams today!
Enjoy!