Naim & Focal now certified Plays with Audirvāna

[Amarok]

Got an email this afternoon from Audirvāna stating the following:

But I noticed to my surprise when starting Audirvāna this afternoon that the ND5 XS 2 was certified as well.

As I have always enjoyed the use of Audirvāna with my ND5 XS 2 tremendously, it is good to know that Naim together with Focal and Audirvāna acknowledge the good symbiosis as well.

[Amarok]

@stevesky I am curious. Could you explain the way Naim as a manufacturer are to test the compatibility of your devices with Audirvāna? And if you can (did) adjust certain parameters on your side to get the devices function optimally?

Because I have noted two things:

1. With the official release of Audirvāna Studio 3.0 I could not play music without issues using convolution and certain ways of upsampling (for example x2 or power of two). Only by using Custom upsampling and creating a stable flow of frequency i.e. 96kHz it would work. This was also the case with the Audirvāna Beta.
2. With the official release of AS 3.0 I could not play music without issues using r8brain upsampling. This was already the case with AS 2.x…

Now both things work flawlessly on the ND5 XS 2. Detailing and soundstage have reached yet another level and I absolutely love it!

I had always made the assumption that the issues were due to my old Dell. Because it was not able to do all the calculations needed in time or whatever.

Since the Plays with Audirvāna certification of Naim and/or the release of Audirvāna Studio 3.1 the issues are solved albeit with the use of the fix toggle for devices with unwanted playback stops. But that fix never did the trick before. Is there something that has changed on your side with the certification which helped the issues disappear?

Because nothing has changed on the Dell. That’s still the same old laptop with the same old hardware running on Linux Mint XFCE.

[Stevesky]

HI @Amarok

Audirvana certified program goals is to ensure product vs Audirvana play together nicely. The team at Audirvana demonstrated that there are enough customers out there that are using this combination so as a business we decided to go through the certification process.

The process involves running through a test plan defined by Audirvana and then send them the results / logs etc for them to review. Once green ticks on all test and some paperwork are done you are good to go.

From the Naim side we updated the codebase around the UPnP side to latest code and to a version that another Audirvana certified manufacturer had passed on.

Overall, we didn’t go back on older code and see if it would pass the cert, but we have confidence on 3.12 we pass all the compliance tests.

Best

Steve