I currently have 3 Naim devices, a Star and 2 Qb1’s. In the near future I’m thinking of adding another Mu-So or Qb, which will take it up to four. I noticed that on the site it says “Sync up to five Naim Streaming products and control via the Naim App.”
Now I’m not immediately thinking of going to five or over, but it got me thinking. What’s the limitation? Will the app not show more than 5 devices? Will multiroom not work for more than five at a time (but any five)? And why a limitation so low (even if few if any will get to that number, what’s the technical reason?) Anyone have any ideas?
The current streamers can run a group of up to 8. The limit of 5 was for the 1st gen. streamers.
I suspect a lot of home networks will struggle with more traffic than this.
Interesting that the site then says it’s five for the gen2 mu-so. So how does it work when mixed? Is it a limit for the master or the whole group?
Regarding the home network, that’s an interesting suggestion, but I don’t think can be right. Your home network will generally be faster (gigabit) than your Internet connection, but as a high-res stream will still be well under 5Mbps, even with Naim’s 100Mbit connection, they should still be able to support close to 20 devices from that pov.
The current streamers have a limit of 8, i.e. 7 client streamers plus the multiroom master streamer. The online support tool says 5, but this is an error, that’s the limit for the 1st gen. streamers. I assume this applies to 1st and 2nd gen. Musos too, but I’m not certain.
So this is a master limit? I.e. a Gen2 could stream to 7 clients (whether gen1 or gen2), but in the same network if initiated from a gen1 streamers only 4 clients would be supported? Is that correct?
But I’m curious to know where this limit comes from? And why would it be different or at least why so low for the new streaming platform which is supposedly future proof with tons of extra computing power?
As both I and @Suedkiez pointed out, the home network argument makes very little sense.
If wired no issues but I could see potential issues if they are all over WiFi, not from bandwidth but from airtime utilisation of you have one WiFi access point for the entire network.
I’m no networking expert, but I very much doubt that it’s a simple case of summing up the data and comparing it to the nominal capacity of an Ethernet connection. Given that every stream of data is a two way process, and you would have 8 separate sets of two way comms all going down the same cable, all of which have to be kept in perfect sync both with each other and with the internal playback of the master streamer, it seems to me that you’re placing quite a heavy demand on it.
It’s not a two way process, the recipient does not stream all the data back to the source. The data also does not have to be in perfect sync for all applications, just multirooming the same stream. If 10 units each play their own stream, there is no such demand. And anyway, if wired you have orders of magnitude more bandwidth than 10 units need and it would be no problem streaming 4K Netflix to 10 devices either. If all are on wifi it’s more limited, obviously, but that’s no reason to put a hard limit.
I’m sure there are reasonable reasons for making the choice, but network bandwidth most likely isn’t one of them
What I’m saying is that all network comms are two way processes. Of course the chunks of music data only flow one way, but they grind to a halt if the client device doesn’t continually reply to the server.
Yes, but this discussion is specifically about multiroom.
Yes, on this we can agree, the point I was making above is that the total volume of data is within the 100MB capacity that the LAN supports. I’m not trying to pretend to be a networking expert here, but I imagine the client streamer in a multiroom group will be working pretty hard coping with an incoming music stream, while simultaneously sending it out to seven clients as well as to its internal DAC.
But a stereo hi-def flac stream has 1 Mbit/s and the unit has a 100 Mbit/s network. Maybe it is more about internal processing, but as music is such a trivial bandwidth I don’t know why it would