Thanks for taking the time to update us here on the forum. It is little things like this that are the reason many of us are so loyal to the brand. The quality offered by these streams is incredible often appearing to my ears better than high res files from my local server! Please keep up the good work.
It seems HiDef radio is available on Muso 2nd gen only. I have a Muso1 & a Muso Qb2 and the Hidef folder shows up in app for QB2 only.
Is the above correct ? I guess Muso 1st gen was not really designed for processing high res audio streaming over the internet (small buffer to handle large amount of data & with potential network latency & jitter)
The 1st gen streamers don’t support the format that iRadio streams use, which is a slightly unusual combination of FLAC in an Ogg wrapper.
“HiDef” iRadio is usually 16/44.1 so not HiRes, just regular lossless streams in most cases, so that is not a limitation for a Mk1 Muso.
As a bit of a workaround I think you will be able to play the HiDef streams by using multiroom with your Qb2. At any rate, it works between my Atom and QB1. It’s a little bit more fiddly to set up and you can’t listen to different streams on your Musos, but it should work.
Thanks to you and all the above suggestions. Correct I should have said CD red book quality and/or hi-res. Then it’s interesting that the Hi-def category doesn’t appear for the Muso1 in the app!
I wonder is Naim just blocklist that category to 1st gen Muso’s. most of the stations bitrate are around 1Mbps and few at 2Mbps.
Thank you, It’s on my to read list. The other suggestion of multi room although overkill may be a temporary workaround. I’ll open a ticket and get confirmation whether lossless iRadio is indeed or not supported from Naim iRadio in the app for 1st gen Muso. Quick read from the linked thread seems to imply no.
The Hidef radio section is only shown on the the gen2 muso’s, not gen1. Main reason is that the Bridgeco Streaming IC used in gen1 has silicon level limitations on its ethernet implementation that makes it sensitive to high latency, relatively high datarate, realtime network links (eg. Listen to JBRadio2 hosted in Canada from the UK). The designers of that chip didn’t expect the world of audio streaming to change so much over 12 years.
I would recommend use the aac variants of the stations where available.
Thank you for the reply and confirmation. I guess when the Muso 1 design was started (few years before release - circa 2013?), the choices of network streaming ICs was limited. Maybe it wasn’t expected back then that HiDef streaming to be somewhat popular in a niche market.
It’s interesting in hindsight to do a retrospection and appreciate previous design decision(s) and where technology is. Ah well, maybe time for some other Naim purchase : )
In the case of Muso 1, for a device to have Airplay1 at that time there was only one chipset that was certifiable - Bridgeco. The certification rules changed in 2015 and then a wealth of more modern chipsets could be used. All manufacturers like Bose, B&W, Naim, Sony, Denon etc. had to use Bridgeco if we wanted AIrplay1 during that time.
In the case of Naim, the equipment keeps on going for a long time. On the software side we updated it to Airplay2 to keep the product fresh, then last month we did another update for Tidal login, latest Airplay lib and various technology moving targets on secure network connections.
Hidef streaming over the net especially internet radio is a bit niche. At Naim we’re quite a fan of it and hence have a dedicated section in the Internet directory, but it does come with technical complexities to make it work reliably as a worldwide solution. When we started the redesign of the next gen streaming platform in 2015, Hidef streaming, including realtime hidef was a key design decision in the hardware technology selected.
But you can use Roon, which does offer all the Internet Radio stations, in all the format types, and then bridge Roon to the earlier Network Players.
I use the SonoreUPnP Bridge to my NDS to do this, with all the benefits of Roon, for Music and Playback Management .
I also have an instance of LMS2UPNP Bridge to run on a RPi2, as a lower cost solution.
I also understand that the RooUPnP solution discussed here, is a good ‘out-of-the-box’ solution, see rooUPnP: Finally a Roon Extension for UPnP Streamers - Audio Gear Talk - Roon Labs Community
Roon can do some of the HD stations, but not all. They choke on some of the ogg/flac format variations out there. For example, JBRadio2 Ogg/Flac is no longer on Roon due to the structure of the stream:
However, it was more that these ‘HiDef’ stations can be played on the BridgeCo based streamers, when using a Roon to UPnP Bridge and adding the older Network Players into a Roon environment, where the limitations of the BridgeCo chip can be mitigated.
Since we don’t mind digressing from the original post I’ll ask: how does minimserver deal with serving plain flac stream instead of flac/vog that the original HiDef stations stream?
I started reading docs but nothing yet. Oh minimstreamer does the transcoding! Thanks.