Yes 2 years seems reasonable
Yes, that’s very true and very good regarding Linn’s Streamers, but with their CDPs, they just dumped all support and hung us out to dry. Whereas Naim still does supoport and repair for almost all of their CDPs.
I had to get rid of my $15k Unidisk 1.1 (luckily I got it pre-owned), for a lousy $2k, while I could still get something for it. It sounded glorious though, and I’m not positive that my digital music will ever be quite as good.
But i’m still working on getting my Naim digital SQ up to that level, And I actually believe I’m almost there. An ND555 would do it, of course.
When Naim stopped making the CDX2, some of us happened to be on a factory tour a few days after the announcement and we asked the then Managing Director Trevor Wilson why Naim had done that.
He replied that they weren’t able to get new CD mechanisms that met their rigorous standards and they wanted to be able to support previously-sold CDX2 units for ten years, so they had to stop making new ones to keep the stock of mechanisms for servicing units customers already had.
Best
David
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I’d like to think that Naim have an obsolescence policy with their suppliers. It means their suppliers have to give them significant notice when the supplier is going to stop making a component. A canny supplier will use such a condition of supply to give notice, make a lifetime amount for their few remaining customers ( often at an inflated rate). Then stop production, if it suits them!
Do CDP mechs would fall into this nicely.
I think they don’t. Naim’s use of component parts is trivially small for most electronic component manufacturers and mostly won’t feature anywhere in suppliers’ strategic planning. No doubt it’s different for bespoke things like casework and toroidal transformers, but for CD mechanisms I doubt that Naim ever bought enough to move the needle on supplier profits.
Best
David
Maybe not. But if they didn’t ask/ demand it as the customer, the supplier is unlikely to offer it.
Equally it may not have been that important to Naim to put it in their contracts.
If I were starting from scratch again I’d probably go with a 2-box rather than 1-box system. A power amp and a streaming pre-amp, or a setup like ND5XS2+SN. Much as I love my SU it will become obsolete long before it’s life expired.
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Are all your posts a guess or supposition? Do you have any experience of Naim products at all? I am intrigued.
I had the same issue a while back with my SU, then an SN2 came along at a great price so I jumped on it. I sold the SU next because there was a local buyer; then it was ND5 XS2 time. However, an NDS showed up at a price I couldn’t pass up.
But I really did enjoy the SU, it’s a nice bit of kit.
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Haha.
My choice of language is quite deliberate. If I guess it is that. If I know, i know.
As for obsolesce and its management, that is a big part of my day job. Strategies to deal with and manage it are important to my business. Having a supply chain and relationships are key to dealing with obsolesce.
Naim are keen to be able to maintain their products and that is clear from what they do and how they do it. As to how they manage obsolescence, I expect they take the simple/crude but effective way of buying lifetime stock, if spares are required. But, with streaming products, I think peoples expectations are more that swapping spares to make things work. Sometimes the original spare is not capable of performing the now expected function. A redesigned “drop-in” will be required.
As for experience of Naim products, yes, I’m a customer and 2 of my 3 sources are Naim.
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Some days on from your helpful post alan33. After more extensive listening the wired solution does not sound too good on the NDX, either into the USB on the front using your work around from the iTunes, or using a converter into the RCA digital input at the back of the NDX. With CD quality from Qobuz using Mconnect is significantly better than the wired connections, (I cant try BubbleUPNP because it is Android only and not available for IOS. ) but with hi res it is unusable due to dropouts. I have contacted Mconnect who say " The drop-out is mostly due to network and/or server performance.
The music file is delivered directly from the server to your audio.
And there could be a bottleneck somewhere between “Qobuz server – internet – your home network - your audio. "
As my iPhone handles hi res Qobuz files to headphones via dragonfly red DAC and my Naim NDX handles hi res from my NAS via home wired network perfectly, the dropouts are a mystery! If the Mconnect UPnP is simply getting the NDX to pick up Qobuz direct, then it looks like the NDX is the problem. Hoping someone on the forum might have some insights into the problem.
I tried Mconnect with my 12 MB Adsl and had a lot of drop outs too, specially hirez.
Today I have fiber and it’s stable. However I don’t use regularly Qobuz neither Tidal.
No drop outs with Tidal at that time with ADSL. I have an Nds.
I’ve been using MConnectHD for months.
At first I thought that it was just a control app - so it would just tell the Tidal or Qobuz server to send the file direct to my Naim 272.
But then someone on the forum told me that the Tidal/Qobuz server actually sends the file to my PlusNet router, and it goes from there via Wifi into my iPad and back to the router and on along the ethernet cables and switches into my 272.
An indirect test of this is that if you play a track from Qobuz/Tidal and then switch off the iPad the track immediately stops playing.
I also contacted ConversDigital who make the MConnectHD app (£6 on iStore), and they told me that the audio files are just forwarded to my 272 unprocessed! No transcoding from FLAC to WAV, no MQA processing.
This is mysterious as I (and others on the forum) hear a consistent but quite small SQ uplift.
So I assume that the act of delivering the files to the 272 via upnp instead of direct from the internet using the Naim app somehow makes a small improvement - perhaps because the 272 does a wee bit less processing when files are sent to it via upnp?? Or because upnp has better timing or media bursts or similar than direct download from the net?? But these latter are just questions and hypotheses.
Speaking of obsolescence, my $12k Imacon scanner has gone on me. It’s been my lifeblood over the last fifteen years. Main suspect is the motherboard, of which there is no more. And even if I wanted to buy a new one, they’ve been discontinued, the used market for high end scanners has dried up since the pandemic began, and the only ones I’ve seen would be to go collect in person. Plus, I’m not really sure I want to invest in another $$$ piece of gear that might have to go in the bin someday.
Sorry to hear that, Charles.
Presumbly you can buy scans as you need them until further notice.
Yes. I’m in the middle of a huge archive go through for a retrospective book, so always nice to just scan once. Most of my ‘greatest hits’ have been scanned of course, having had the machine for fifteen years now.
I’m thinking an Epson 850 flatbed just so I can actually speed up the process some (the Imacon is quite slow) for the first round, and then spot scan for the final on a rental or borrowed. Mostly 35mm but some 120 and even flat stuff. It’s just that the Imacon has been such an integral part of my life for a long time, it’s sad to have it not working one day. I was just about to send it back east to Hasselblad for routine maintenance as well (about $850-1k with shipping).
Good luck with that.
Let us know when it’s published.
Good you are trying things out and making progress, albeit only in terms of eliminating some ideas!
Here is where I owe an apology for sloppy language… and since I don’t do this myself, I can only point to other threads to get you started!
First, the proxy server (that sits between Roon or Qobuz and converts to make it look like a UPnP source) is a plug-in for Logitech Media Server, and it runs on a bunch of platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux including many common NAS and Raspberry Pi versions). It is called LMS2UPnP (or lms-to-UPnP).
You can find step by step ways to install and use this here on the forum, mostly for people who are adding Roon as the control interface; some use BubbleUPnP but I guess you learned that doesn’t work on iOS?
Searching you should find a thread with info from @trickydickie:
“There was a thread that had the information on it. It’s here https://community.naimaudio.com/t/howto-roonify-non-roon-streamers-lms-to-upnp/751 ”
If you pursue this path, you may find adding the Roon trial really useful… even if you don’t like it, it should allow you to evaluate the sound quality. Others report Qobuz sounds equivalent to locally streamed files using this method, and hi res sounds better apparently.
If you are put off by installing the software and the plug in (but don’t be! give it a go!), there are also hardware bridges available that would come pre-configured to achieve this… again, I’m going by what I’ve read here, not what I’ve tried (aside from adding some RaspPi RoPieee end points to my existing Roon setup to bring new life to old hardware).
Again, my apologies for getting the name wrong! You need the lms-to-UPnP server on your network, and a control point application of your choice… especially Roon.
I hope the link to the instruction thread works… if not, use the search tool for Qobuz Roon or Roonify to see how others have added this functionality to their first-gen streaming platform devices. (Edit: I searched “Qobuz lms” and the summary from trickydickie was the first result…)
Regards alan
Edit 2: ps- there is a very recent thread of interest here:
You can run BubbleUPnP Server on a variety of different devices (I used a Synology NAS) and there are iOS apps that can control it. It will run Tidal, Qobuz and local streams.
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