A friend is considering buying a demo Uniti Lite b at a deep discount. It does come with a warranty however he’s been told that Naim may no longer have access to legacy streaming boards. Should the streaming board fail in any legacy streamer it is unlikely to be able to be repaired. @Richard.Dane (or others in the know) you are likely the best informed person on such matters wondering if you can you confirm this to be true or not?
If indeed this is the case I am curious how common streaming board failures occur with legacy streamers. Searching the forum there doesn’t seem to be much chatter on it so thinking it’s not common. I’m also wondering if the streaming board fails will that mean the dac also fails (are they on the same board)?
These are made by streamunlimited and used by a multitude of hifi companies such as dcs. I imagine the failure rate is pretty low. Same goes for pc motherboards - which this is basically not so different - and I’m using computers that are a few years old; a muso qb gen 1, unitiqute both the latter are the original steaming board and work perfectly.
It is true that these streaming boards are no longer available unfortunately.
They tend to have three failure mode:
Failure to recognise USB sticks.
Failed update (never use wifi for this).
Failed communication with the BridgeCo IC
Number 1 isn’t too much of an issue, but 2 & 3 are terminal as the entire machine relies on communication between the ARM & BridgeCo & won’t boot past the error code.
Failures are fairly rare though.
Thanks @NeilS that is excellent information. Related to this can you let me know if the dac is on the same board? Trying to determine if the streaming board went does that mean the dac does too.