The small NDX buffer almost certainly won’t handle 24 bit web streams reliably. There are two ways you can bypass this issue. One is to use a different streamer such as the Wiim, a Bluesound, ND5XS2, etc. etc. that has a bigger buffer, connected to the NDX SPDIF input. This will bypass the entire streaming board in the NDX, and its buffer, and will connect to the SHARC DSP, which is effectively part of the DAC.
The other way is to use a proxy server, such as BubbleUPnP server or Roon. These buffer the stream from Tidal, but still send it to the NDX streaming board over your network. The small buffer in the NDX is still used in this case, but because it receives the stream from the proxy server running on your local network rather than a Tidal server on the other side of the globe, it doesn’t suffer from long round trip delays that this often entails, so again it should work reliably.
Are you sure that something like a Bluesound Node has a bigger buffer vs for example an Ndx?
If it’s true, I don’t understand why a product costing ten times more has a smaller buffer ? Is it a wrong original choice from Naim ?
Thanks Chris, I have been looking at the Wiim Pro, the fact that it offers a bit perfect stream, I am hoping it will sound at least as good as the in built Tidal that I use🤔
With hindsight you could say that it was a poor choice by Naim to use such a small buffer, but it was designed to stream 16/44.1 CD rips located on your home network, and for this the buffer was plenty big enough. When the streaming board was upgraded to handle 24/96, and then 24/192, it could still handle it from a local stream, i.e. from a NAS running a UPnP server.
When internet streaming services became popular, Naim obviously felt obliged to support them. First Spotify, then Tidal lossless, which is where the problems started. Although the stream was only 16/44.1 FLAC, it is not delivered as a smooth, consistent flow of data that you get from a local stream. There are constant delays caused by the lengthy route from Tidal’s servers around multiple legs across the web, so sometimes the buffer would empty before the next packet of data arrived.
Thanks, I understand now 
When I still had a 1st gen ND5-XS I solved the problem of streaming hi-res, by using Roon and repurposing an old Logitech Squeezebox Touch as a Roon bridge. With that I was able to use 24/192 Qobuz streams. That worked pretty well until I upgraded to a NDX2.
There is already a thread running for awhile @ MQA going into administration
… and they both end up dead …
The relevant buffer here is the network stack buffer for TCP windowing… this is only relevant when you use wifi or Ethernet.
The buffer limitation on the older streamers is certainly a bit of a bugger if it’s the only limitation on being able to potentially play 24/192 Tidal Flac and I do wonder if the boffins at Naim may be able to find a way around that. The alternative of using another front end streamer and just the NDX DSP/DAC seems a little messy although I am curious about Josquin’s solution of using an old Logitech Squeezebox as a roon bridge as I have a spare lying around. Bubble UPnP seems a bit of a non-starter for me given my NAS is a Netgear and from reading around the subject the only way to install it seems to be to install it on the NAS O/S partition which seems unwise to me.
I did see this intriguing comment from a Tidal employee: we will be introducing hi-res FLAC for our HiFi Plus subscribers soon. It’s lossless and an open standard. It’s a big file, but we’ll give you controls to dial this up and down based on what’s going on.
I wonder if that means 24/96 will be an option and might that work?
JonathanG
It would work better, as it’s half as many bits per second, but still would be subject to breaks when the stream from the Qobuz server is momentarily interrupted, if that interruption is longer than the length of the buffer in the streamer.
The issue in the old streamers is basically a hardware limitation and I doubt that there is anything more that Naim can do about it unfortunately.
Interesting news.
As a Tidal Masters user I have mixed feelings about this:
On the one hand, and no doubt blasphemy to some, I like the sound of MQA. It seemed to give more ‘space’ around instruments and ‘air’ compared with more ‘standard’ resolutions. With my Arcam D33 DAC I stream up to 96KHz and it sounds very good to me.
However, I’ve never managed to achieve the full unfold, despite even when using a Meridian Explorer 2 MQA DAC with the laptop set to give the best output possible. It has also made shopping for a suitable rig for our upcoming room conversion a very complicated matter. In the long run, if Tidal do switch to a more standard/compatible hi-res streaming implementation for their Masters customers then it will make thing significantly more straightforward.
As a side-note, this morning I read an article suggesting that MQA had a revenue of about £650,000 last year but costs of £4million. Assuming this is correct, regardless of the technical merits of MQA, there was certainly something wrong with the business model!
Yes, this is true. My old ND5XS trounced a Pi/Digi Hat.
One of the directors had a salary of almost £400k, can’t recall if that was part of the £4 million “Administrative” costs. At least they didn’t pay themselves and dividends and the pension contributions were modest.
If Tidal will offer Hi-Res FLAC, I wonder if the new streamers will neeed a firmware update to be able to play the new streams.
I also wonder if the old streamers will also need new firmware just to keep playing regular CD quality?
FLAC is a standard. If TIDAL offers 24-bit FLAC streams there’s no reason the new streamers should need an update. They are already playing them from files and Qobuz.
They will need some changes, if only to allow you to choose the quality level in settings, which at the moment only offers three levels up to ‘HiFi’ which is 16/44.1. I suspect other stuff under the hood too.
It would be @chrisG - Directors emoluments are typically (almost always under UK GAAP and company law) reported within administrative expenses. The notes to the published financial statements for 2021 confirm this and publicly report that the highest paid director received emoluments of in excess of £400k, when turnover (sales income) for that year was c.£650k. Unfortunately this is clearly not financially sustainable and in my personal opinion a combination of lack of penetration/business scaling (of the MQA business model) coupled with sub-optimal financial management (unable/not willing to match costs to limited income budget) has resulted in a balance sheet going into administration of c.£(30)million - basically 6-8 years of this largely unchanged business model and financial ‘performance’.
I guess the SA investment backer was not willing to support this model any longer, and in the current capital constrained global economy we unfortunately see ourselves in, the directors could not secure alternative finance in time (by end of Q1/23).
If you choose to read through the previous few years’ financial reports, going concern was a major issue for the auditors (in their report), and it was only by receiving continued assurances (and capital) from the main investor was a qualified annual audit report avoided, thereby avoiding the continuous legal duty of the directors to review solvency and consider puting the entity into administration.
It is worth noting (and is my personal opinion (although I have a lot of experience in reading financial statements as it is my profession)) that at the rate of cash burn in the company over the last few years, that without regular capital injections from the investor administration could well have been a legal consideration as early as a few years ago (as the business was haemorrhaging cash at the rate of (single digit) millions). This is typical of most software businesses as we all know and appreciate but it is not typical that start-ups that fail to rapidly grow (and ‘make hay while the sun shines’, thereby proving the business model) continue to be supported for more than 2-3 years, thereby limiting investors’ financial exposure. Sadly, as many observers have noted above, the business model could not scale fast enough, appears to have stagnated in the last few years, but continued to burn cash at a significant rate leading to the current situation.
It is most unfortunate that the biggest losers are likely to be the creditors (suppliers) who at end of ‘21 were owed over £15million, and unless the company is pulled out of administration (difficult to see imho, but not impossible) also the employees who strived to make the business a success but may end up losing their jobs.
I know that my NDX probably won’t be able to play Hi Res FLAC, due to the piddling size of the buffer. I can add a new streamer unit and use the digital feed in to the NDX though. Problem is, which one though🤣