But when they sound good, they sound sublime…
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Wait a minute… how much do you trust your cat? 
Indeed, and if it’s not doing that then this says a lot about a system to me. Less than stellar recordings should still sound really enjoyable, in a revealing system or not. This is where a top notch source comes into play and not the other way around.
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Jim’s brother is quite active on Audiogon forum with spares supply and advise if you haven’t found him yet. Look for the Thiel owners thread.
@Richard.Dane I hope you’ll allow this infraction as it’s quite useful to any one trying to keep Thiels running.
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Things are falling into place. The bass is no longer problematic and is much more defined compared with my prior setup.
The system remains brighter than my prior setup. This is most noticeable when listening to brass. As I mentioned above, Miles Davis’ trumpet leaps out at me. I can hear similar things on a number of jazz albums. A lot more bite. For me (with tinnitus) that can be problematic if I don’t set the volume control precisely (switched to +/-), but when I do the brass can sound great.
As mentioned above, the detail and soundstage are much improved.
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I have been where you are. Innuos recently issued their 2.0.5 software, which has dramatically lifted the SQ of those albums that lost the sparkle. My conclusion is that the upgrade affected the way it draws power which then interacts with the other boxes. I don’t have DR on my 552/500 so it may be more sensitive.
So with streamers there are the unexpected factors. You can chase improvements, but can’t fix some problems. Now at least I can enjoy all my music. I had the good times, but then a new software release came out to disrupt things.
I’m was a research scientist so I like to find explanations. For the time being this theory fits, and the rest of the Innuos community here has the same findings.
Phil
@Stu299 and @easeback1, have you tried the live album ‘Familiar to Millions’ ? I found it sounds better than most other Oasis albums, from a recording quality standpoint. Very enjoyable, pretty immersive type Live feeling, and good clarity of instruments and voices, not a blurred aggregate of sound mesh despite the saturated guitars.
And overall, the hi-res or even 44kHz-16bit recordings (like the above mentioned) from Qobuz (true for Tidal as well) sound often significantly better than the earlier CD versions. It’s nice to rediscover tracks now and then in a much better recorded format. When it happens, it’s kind of a free upgrade, I feel, that one gets through a fixed cost monthly subscription to such online streaming service with a perpetually expanding and sound quality upgrading music catalogue. For that I highly value those album re-issues and like screening new music regularly added to the service, and I have stopped almost completely listening to the hundreds of CDs that I had engraved on a NAS. This is precisely for that recording quality issue that you have raised.
As an additional note, I used to believe that the better the Hi-Fi system the more revealing of quality issues in recording and that a bad recording would sound even worse on a higher end hi-fi system. I’m not sure that’s actually true anymore. I’m finding throughout the upgrades that the listening gets more and more enjoyable, and even for lower quality recordings.
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…and prepare for a long afternoon of reading!
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Do you use the Dynamic Range Database?
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If your system starts to dictate what music you listen to, you have the wrong system…
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It’s not the system doing the dictating. It’s the quality of the music. If an album sounds like it was recorded in a garage, with cloths over the microphones and wind coming through the cracks in the window frames, with the tapes then dropped in a muddy bucket, no system will make it sing. Blame the production, not the reproduction.
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With my Naim setup Neil Young sounds amazing but Bowie sounds poor.
How true old saying rubbish in rubbish out to a degree a good system with cover some cracks over. Unfortunately it will highlight poor recordings with my setup and Atc speakers some old recordings ( we all have lemons in our collection) they sound like an old cassette with Dolby C on in a bucket full of muddy water. Even the other half listening passively noticed a big drop in quality, this was also true at my dealer Doug Brady Warrington
Some crappy recordings may sound poor on a decent system, but here’s the upside, great sounding recordings sound amazing on a good system. What this means in practice is that a good system can open up new genres of music and new artists. I’m discovering classical music, jazz and soul in ways I never thought I would. I’m currently loving a bit of Nat King Cole - those are words I never thought I’d utter!
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Personally I’d recommend build a rocket boys by Elbow - some nice/amusing lyrics.
As both sources are digital, and assuming good condition cd/error free RIP => error free digital, surely this can only be due to the DAC …?
I’m using an Ndac, which in theory has a better dac than that used in the CDS2.
However, the reason the CDS2 is better than the Ndac, is Naim have total control in a CD player, the laser operation, the CD motor operation, the internal DAC, power supply…………
Presumably through listening tests, they ensured it sounded very good with the vast majority of discs. More consistent.
Naim didn’t rush into producing a DAC; they said they wouldn’t do so, because they couldn’t control the quality of what was upstream of the DAC.
At one extreme there is feeding the DAC from £20 Tesco DVD player, at the other extreme there are people spending thousands of pounds on numerous boxes and cables in an attempt to get the sound they want.
I doubt the average person has the knowledge to put together a streaming system, made up of numerous boxes that will sound as consistent as a CD player. Unless they are very lucky.
Agreed the source has a definite influence hear - i was assuming a naim CD compared to a Naim Streamer, so source in essence is of similar quality. Assuming the streamer source is a NAS or similar it is just 0’s and 1’s … i really don’t buy the jitter type arguments … it’s a digital source - It spits out 1s and 0’s nothing between the two. I also don’t accept that a zero could be close to a 1 and get transposed. If that were the case computer networks would simply fail and crash. This leads to my assertion of the DAC. Interested to hear your views, if we assume the source of reading the digital stream are both of good quality.
You can’t send 0s and 1s down a bit of wire. You can only send an analogue representation of each state.
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Computer networks use checksums to ensure data is accurate.