Hello all. I have been a Naim aspirational for probably 20 years. Been up to Meridian for Hone Cinema and with life and changes and house moves I went back down to Sonos and B&W speakers.
But now I live in a small cottage nice lounge, kitchen and living room I want to wirelessly link up with nice sound.
I still love movies but don’t need the power of large speakers so been using a sonos beam and couple of ones.
But my lady wants music around the house now and I have done so much reading on the QB the Mu-So and the Ruark. Bluesound and other Sonos and I think the Mu-So will be brilliant in the lounge for great listening. I want to use it as an ARC HDMI instead of a beam and I’m not overly worried about surrounds for now.
But I have read that there are problems with certain TVs and consistency of operation. For £1500 I would expect it to work flawlessly ??
From there I love the idea of the Bluesound software which seems to be able to easily control different sound and different rooms. I can seem to find anything on the Naim app except it’s got better. But I know this is a moving target. I could easily just fall back to Sonos but I want to take a chance and hopefully not regret a move to Naim. The room isn’t really set up to be square for the perfect AV config so a usual AV set up won’t really get a look in and one side of the room has not power sockets.
Any advice you can offer here to help allay my concerns and give me the ideas for great sound in the lounge, social sound in the dining room and functional in the kitchen. Bedrooms can come later and I can always step up each time. I can’t afford to go all in from the start but can over time get more.
Thanks in advance and sorry to be all over the place and detailed in areas and vague in others.
Tony HDMI and HDMI ARC have always been something of a minefield I’m afraid. If only the engineers had been left alone to work it out without the lawyers getting involved! It’s mainly down to the handshaking necessary between devices in order to lift the copy protection system. I don’t think anyone can absolutely guarantee that their HDMI solution will work with 100% everything out there and vice versa. Firmware updates for various devices can easily change something inadvertently that then causes a handshake issue with another particular device. Naim work hard to try to ensure that their HDMI ARC solution is as compatible as they can make it. And if there is an issue with a particular model or a firmware version then you can fall back on s/pdif and Naim will try to work with the other device maker to ensure compatibility improves in future updates.
Thank you Richard. I get it and yea I have seen specific TV Mu-So reworks discussed so that’s encouraging. Do you have a view of Naim app vs Bluesound app or the Roon ? Been trying to find screen shots of the workings of the Naim app with not too much success on how my wife would use it to control music in the kitchen while I am listening to TV ?
I don’t as I only use the Naim app and the only streaming I can reliably do here is from locally stored and served music.
With the Naim network players, all-in-ones and Mu-Sos, you can choose to play them either individually or as a group, all from within the one Naim App.
You open the Naim app and select the device you want to control. These are called “rooms”.
After that, it’s just a case of selecting what you want to play ie the source, and then the album or track.
Not sure how that setup works? Active B&W’s? Zeppelin? When I shopped around for a similar situation in 2018, I found the Sonos 5 pretty good sonically. Personally I hated the design, and fell in love with the QB design instead. You may think differently. My TV is hooked up to a very modest Sony soundbar now, also because my 100y old apartment building is very noisy being all wooden floors etc. What I don’t like by the way about Sonos is how they tend to want to stop supporting their product’s firmware quite fast. (I think the technical term associated with this is planned obsolescence, which I think is a consumer society abomination) Thankfully Naim is quite different here.
As Robert advises above, you need to set the digital output of your LG TV to 2 Channel PCM instead of Multichannel bitstream. The Mu-So is a 2 channel unit so uses a 2 channel DAC, so cannot decode a multichannel bitstream signal - you just get noise instead.
absolutely spot on - i was looking for 2 channel, stereo and all other 2 channel combos and as Robert you suggested hit the PCM one !!! Thank you sounds great now !!!
