Internet Radio _ Hidef section updated

If you have one of the older streamers you may want to have a read of this (native-flac-via-iradio)

A long thread but essentially you can add some high quality radio thanks to the hard work of one of the forum members

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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.

Roger

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.

Muso 1st gen


Muso QB2

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.

Hi @aboulfad

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.

Best wishes

Steve Harris
Software Director
Naim Audio Ltd.

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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 : )

Hi @aboulfad

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.

Best regards

Steve

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Appreciate very much the info and replies on a Sunday : ) Sorry to have digressed this OP, with regards.

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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

Hi @simon.pepper

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:

See Roon forum thread:

Playable on Naim from v3.7 or above though :slight_smile:

Best

Steve

oh JB Radio-2 has been available in FLAC then not, then back, then not for sometime.

At present the FLAC streams are hidden

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.

JB Rado 2 has been working for me on my legacy streamer through minimserver or iRadio via Kurt’s cloud solution.

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.

JB radio has never worked using Naim app into ndx2/555ps
No problem with any other station

Hi @davidf

Just did a sanity check here (uk) and based on v3.7.1 firmware it plays. I think JB has some geolocation restrictions as well, so maybe blocked in some countries.

Best regards

Steve

Steve, I’ll trust you on your statements about the silicon. Having said that, you obviusly now my tiny project “ForwardProxy”? ← Link

I started this somewhere in March as a solution/workaround allowing Gen1 users enjoy the HD streams. To be 100% correct, I started this as a personal challenge to listen to Naim Jazz in HD, as this is what I like. The moment I got this fixed, I extended my application to support multiple HD stations. This worked out quite good. At the same time I figured out there were still some other Naim customers suffering with the same issue.

At home, I’m running this on a Raspberry PI, but as I developed the application in Java, it’s very easy to port this to other environments. So, to share this with other customers, I created a Free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment in both Frankfurt and Phoenix where I deployed the software. Initially I only ran it in Frankfurt, and yes, this caused latency/drop-out issues for people residing in the US. Hence, the Phoenix hub. Based on feedback, I never faced issues with for example JB Radio 2. I’m working from home and I’m listening via my “ForwardProxy” (FWP) to HD streams on 2 Gen 1 devices at least 14h a day, without hickups.

After 7y, I’m still very happy with my Gen 1 devices. Although, I don’t feel comfortable with the position Naim takes on Gen 1 devices wrt HD streams. I mean, if I can do it, as an average programmer, I’m confident Naim could do it for sure. Moreover, my solutions works ok since March, so yeah… what else to say?

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Based on my findings on Gen 1 devices:

  • Naim allows plain vanilla Flac files via the DLNA/UPnP input, not OggFlac. So, Minimserver allows you to create a radio station, and basically unwraps the OggFlac input to a Flac and feeds this to the Naim. So, for the Naim it looks you feed the DLNA input with a flac coming from you NAS, and it processes it.
  • The iRadio input is a different story. After lots of debugging, I came to the conclusion Naim refuses plain vanilla Flac input via iRadio. Up till today they never confirmed this. However, when I convert the same input to WAV and inject it in the Naim, it works. This is the reason why ForwardProxy converts to WAV and not to Flac.
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I think you know the answer: new feature support for previous gen products are driven by market demand, strategy and priorities. That one (HD radio) isn’t but airplay2 did.

Does anyone know why the JB Radio 2 Flac stream only shows the song title and not the artist? Is this because it not transmitted by JB, or how the metadata is being handled?

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