I’m thinking of purchasing either a Naim Atom or Nova. I like to play along with the music I’m streaming with a keyboard or two (or three!). I think in order to do this, I’d connect RCA cables from the “Pre-Amp output” of the Atom into the mixing board, connect the keyboards to the mixing board where I could adjust levels, then come back from the mixing board with an RCA pair to the “input”. Finally I’d connect the speakers to the Naim Atom (or Nova). Would that work? If I just want to hear a keyboard without streaming any music would this set up still work? Thanks for your help. Any other way to do this?
Unfortunately this won’t work - you can’t feed the signal from the pre-amp out back into the pre-amp “in”.
What you would need here is a streamer and an amp with a tape loop - you would then plug the mixer and keyboards into the tape loop so that you can switch it in or out accordingly.
You could play your keyboard through the Naim quite happily, taking an output from the mixing board to an analogue input.
Now, say you were streaming and wanted to play along, as soon as you switch to the input for the keyboard, the streaming would stop.
You could, as well as what Richard suggests, get a cheap streamer to connect into the board, and then take the board output into the Naim. Of course, if you downloaded the music to your computer, bought it in other words, you could connect the computer to the board and do it that way.
Other options: first less convenient - route the output of your streamer to the mixer, and mixer to a preamp input, and re-route whan you want to go back to playing music without the keyboard involved. Second likely not the very best for sound quality - route as above, and thereafter leave connected through the mixer all the time.
I’ve done it the tape loop way as Richard described, and although it is not something I do frequently I have the cables set up in readiness. In my case, however, as I don’t use a preamp in normal music replay I have to connect in the preamp specially when I want to play the keyboard (or any other instrument instrument not purely acoustically. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it only takes a minute, and maximises sound quality when just listening to music so I’m happy doing it.
Thanks to all for your help and advice.
Thanks for your advice–I’m guessing if instead of buying the music to my computer, I could stream to the computer and then connect computer to mixing board (with keyboards) and then into the Naim Atom? Would that work? Would music quality be worsened?
Thanks for your help. I had another idea: Take the Audio out of the Naim Atom into the mixer and then plug the mixer (to which the keyboards are attached) into the speakers. Would that work?
Depends how good the amp is in the mixer - otherwise it seems a bit of a waste of the Atom really.
That probably sounds like the best idea. Absolute quality won’t matter so much if it’s just for playing along. For serious listening you can stream directly using the Atom.
I think HH is right, otherwise it is a bit of rewiring each time.
You could, of course just record the music from the streamer (to cassette, digital recorder, or RTR), then play that back through a mixer along with you musical instrument of choice. Alternatively, do what I do - listen to the music on your hifi and play your instrument back through a separate amp (I use my Marshall DSL40C for that)
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