Is Naim missing something in the long run?

Oh - can it? I didn’t know that - I thought that it just made graphs of room/speaker responses.

To me it sounds as if SO hadn‘t been setup properly. SO is not a tone control. It tackles individual misbehaving frequencies in your room and reduces their amplitude with a narrow filter. With SOv1 one should not simply switch it on and leave it at that. The calculated damping values are usually much too high and you get that soullessness. You have to go through every mode and adjust the damping of the mode individually, using your preferred listening method. Since your ears are the ultimate criterion, you are likely to arrive at a satisfactory result. Linn has a detailed procedure described somewhere on their web site.

When adjusting a mode, typically there is a narrow (few dB) margin from thin and soulless to thick and impenetrable. You have to find a suitable damping level between these two points. For me, in my room, getting a satisfactory result takes about 3-4 hours for my 6 or 7 room modes.

SOv2 is a bit quicker to implement, because there aren‘t that many variables.

In any case, SO is a great addition to an audiophile’s toolkit, and a life saver in my square room. Room modes have plagued me until Linn finally had SO in their streamers. SO is one of the reasons I won‘t be able to return to a Naim source in the foreseeable future. The other one is Naim‘s listlessness regarding active operation.

And I couldn‘t see a reason why Naim shouldn‘t add such a feature to their products. Not everyone is blessed with the means to build their ideal listening room. And why should I put up with a horrendous bass mode, when an excellent solution is available?

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I own a Linn Klimax DSM/3, and it’s been set up a one of the best Linn dealers in the Bay Area, I prefer it with the SO v2 enabled by a big margin.

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We are not all blessed with the perfect room for our listening, afford someone to set it up for me nor the ability or will to plaster acoustic treatments around a living space. My home is just that a home not a recording studio and the last thing I or my other half want is stuff to remove that feeling, putting art on acoustic panels does not do it for me. I have very limited placement options and took a long time to get the best overall position in my room for my system. Roons DSP with some help from HAF has made it all reach its full potential and sounds superb to my humble ears, I hear more in the music, better separation, timing , everything really. To me its the single biggest improvement to my system. When I am next in the market for a new amp I will be looking at one with DSP built in. I will also likely be buying in the interim a mini DSP unit for the analogue side.

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trinnov does it i think .

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Yes, the Trinnov is an interesting sounding piece of kit. Of course the same limitations as to things it simply cannot correct. In the link you posted a couple of weeks ago they were used to reduce two problem peaks arising from enforced poor speaker placement - which apparently they achieved very well, where a pair of active bass traps hadn’t been sufficient, and the 4 estimated to be needed wouldn’t fit the room - and would have cost much the same as the Trinnov.

thanks to remember my post, i have even forgotten that the PMC Fenestria set up used trinnov space optimization.
I have never tried it personally so don’t have really an idea if it will work positively or not for me ( with same natural , unforced and lively sound). I discovered that Trinnov is french also.

No need for all these stuffs, a couple of unemployed mathematicians from OxBridge would fix the room correction software for Naim in no time.

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What???
So called room correction software is not particularly challenging, you need software developers, not mathematicians, the algorithms and methods are available to programmers proficient with DSP programming and engineering… however equally important is the hardware to run it… that needs careful digital electronics engineering design so as to provide the optimum SQ performance, and the resources in the streamers using the Analog Devices SHARC processor are unlikely to be able to run it without an unacceptable impact to SQ if at all possible with the current Naim product architecture.
The DSP in the current Naim streamers is relatively very straight forward using a zero value over sampler, and a single IIR Butterworth low pass filter with added poles (steepness) to reduce time smearing in the audio band… it’s apparently only a few lines of assembler long, the SHARC processor does most of the heavy lifting, and those lines are carefully sequenced and timed so as to provide the best SQ performance in terms of minimum added aberrations from the filter processing,
(If not familiar conceptually think of a SHARC processor as equivalent to a purpose built DSP FPGA processor).

My view is that if Naim ever toy with more involved DSP such as EQ and Room / Speaker correction then they will most likely use a processor separate from the DAC, with a high sample rate link between the processor and DAC or streamer… perhaps call it Uniti Core DSP or something,… kind of not dis similar to the approach Roon usually take.

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You made that specific suggestion a couple of weeks ago… What is it you know of the state of employment of mathematicians (specifically, ones from Oxbridge)?

Re DSP, I can understand if Naim’s view is that negative effects of DSP outweigh the benefits given that with due care in room setup you can usually fix most problems. But that is ignoring the fact that a significant proportion of customers or potential customers also want their rooms to be normal living rooms (or as near normal as semi-industrial looking massed ranks of black boxes can be!). On that basis, it would make every sense to offer it in their digital boxes, though that may mean waiting for other models with the added necessary processing capacity, or offer another black box. And the latter perhaps could also double as an active crossover to update the Snaxo range, making it feasible to activate a much wider range of speakers. Unless, of course, it would cost more than something like the Trinnov, and Naim judge the latter is as good as they could do and so not worth competing…

But remember, of course, DSP still cannot fix everything, and aside from the possibly relatively rare problem of cancellations, early reflections in particular may be worth fixing if your room design/layout create them.

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@Innocent_Bystander, Of course, I was just joking about the the unemployment state of the OxBridge postgraduates. Otherwise, I would not get your attention. :slight_smile:

@Simon-in-Suffolk, I think the Linn SO algorithm is much more sophisticated than what you think it is, although I do not know exactly how they do it. But by the look of it, there are quite a lot of variables, it even has some of the environmental variables such as room temperature, humidity, window, wall materials, etc. So it cannot be implemented by a couple of assembly lines, I would have thought.

What are you going on about???

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I think Simon meant that the DSP already in Naim’s streamers is only a few lines of code, but to implement good room equalisation would be much more complex, and so could not suggest the added to the existing products!

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Which is true and as far I know the crunching for SO2 is done in the cloud. It is much more sophisticated than simple room-correction code. SO2 and room-correction is not the same thing.

Only the result of this is run on the device and it has the potential to improve music listening to a certain level.

But there will always be boutique-audio which together with user-knowledge will be able to go beyond this.

Naims big problem is they seem stuck in a 1960’s model of a stereo where you have a gramophone, a tuner and a tape-deck and need a traditional preamp that can handle these plus a CD-player. Naim is right about the gain staging needed. They are wrong in their apparent belief that it can only be implemented on top of a traditional preamplifier.

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I know what he (and you) is talking about, but not exactly related to what I was saying, maybe I was not very clear in this context.

Of course, the Linn SO model is not perfect, and there are many limitations, but it keeps improving over time.

No matter how sophisticated the processing it can’t get around the mathematical limitations of digital filters.

Using software to apply even simple room correction algorithms to the data in the file in non-realtime processing before they even start to be sent to the player, still cause a loss of quality in the signal, even in parts of the frequency spectrum that are supposedly not significantly affected by the filter(s).

The gains from any DSP processing have to exceed the negative effects of this mathematical degradation for it to be beneficial to the sound quality.

I don’t know the degree of ‘sophistication’ although I did discover two years ago it wasn’t quite as advanced as I thought when I was talking to Linn about it.

I was referring to the Naim designs with the SHARC assembler… Naim keep it simple by design so as to keep processing noise to a minimum.

Which bit don’t you understand? The DSP is performed by a SHARC DSP processor running DSP functions with Naim
Other manufacturer designs use FPGA DSP processors to do similar functions. Conceptually they do the similar things … sorry I don’t understand why you don’t understand that…:thinking:

Now it’s my turn to say, what are you on about…
You have some rather strong assertions there… you might not agree with how Naim design and build their Hi-Fi… but good thing is there are plenty of other manufacturers out there … however can’t quite understand why you hang around a Naim social media site if you think their approach and ‘beliefs’ are wrong as well as their ‘big problem’ is that they are rooted to 1960 stereo systems…

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Linn SO v2 just came out a few months ago, it was completely different algorithm than what it was 2 years ago.