Gven that, I haven’t a clue. Time to ask Naim!
You said this was more likely on older playlist. So I take not every playlist has this problem?
I’m wondering whether an upgrade has added indexes to the playlist settings and moved some setting out of alignment. Specifically, whether older playlists are now being incorrectly detected as for use with multiroom and therefore converted to MP3 on-the-fly during playback.
If you delete an affected playlist and manually recreate it with the same tracks, does the problem persist?
Interesting. Is that something tye Core does?
It’s something that all Naim streaming devices automatically do if there is one or more 1st gen streamers in a multi-room setup.
Now, the OP may or may not have ever had a Gen 1 streamer and may have never used multiroom but I wonder if there is some metadata stored with a playlist and the index at wherever a mutliroom gen 1 flag was is now different.
I’m clutching at straws a bit here but for the purpose of troubleshooting, I think it is worth taking one affected playlist and recreating it to see if it fixes the problem.
It’s an interesting issue and certainly one that would be well worth running past Naim. I’m sure they would be really interested finding out what’s going on.
Hi all,
Some interesting theories in this thread, but want to nail down some hard facts on what goes on:
- Core has no ability to do any form of conversion of the audio, apart from on the SPDIF out and audio with sample rates more than 192kHz. Simply because you can’t fit it down SPDIF due to the limitations of the S/PDIF spec.
- Playlists are held in an internal database and are references to track ID’s, which eventually point to physical file URL’s. If they’re in a playlist or you manually browse and pick the track it’s the same thing.
- If hosting to a streamer via UPnP or or playqueue then that is even more abstracted as the streamer just gets a URL to play and has no idea if it came from a playlist or not.
Now, I’m not saying its unfeasible for it to sound different - in the world of hifi there can be a lot of complex interactions going on. But at a system level there is no foul play like playlists have different processing applied to them compared to direct browsing and playing a track.
Hope that helps add a bit of clarify.
Best wishes
Steve
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Given that it is claimed that reducing the comms traffic between streamer/server and app improves sound quality. Presumably increasing traffic would degrade sound quality.
Is it possible that streaming from a playlist increases the comms traffic.
It doesn’t work like that. Once you have told the streamer and the server what to do, the app isn’t involved.
Also I don’t think it’s in any way correct that reducing the comms traffic increases sound quality. But in this case there isn’t any increase anyway. The same files are sent as Steve pointed out.
The streamer is continually communicating with the app. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to monitor the track progress using the app.
If you sit gazing at the app, then it would but mostly one wouldn’t do that. And anyway I still don’t think the traffic between the streamer and the app is in any way relevant to sound quality, especially as the traffic is identical between playing a playlist and playing the same file without using a playlist.
It’s still moving whether you are watching it or not. 
Maybe there is also increased traffic between the streamer and server sections.
The app isn’t even necessarily running once you let it go into the background. Anyway it’s the same traffic! It’s just a wrong argument. Sorry.
I don’t actually think you know if that is true. Although it may be.
If you switch off the app the music will continue playing, but streamer will still be trying to communicate with the app.
Presumably the streamer is continually communicating with server.
It’s more likely to be the other way around, the app querying the streamer for it’s current status.
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But the app is turning off.
Just to clarify I’m not arguing that my suggestion is the answer to the problem.
It’s nothing more than a suggested cause.
Turning off what?
The connection is initiated from the app, i.e. the streamer is sitting there doing nothing then you open the app and ask it to play something, the app keeps querying the streamer as to what it’s doing. You close the app the streamer carries on playing. You then open the app again on the same device or a different one it connects to the streamer again and queries it’s current status.
Turning was a predictive typo, I meant turned.
So are you saying the steamer will not communicate to the app what it is doing (which could be very often) without receiving a request each time it does so.
It’s a two way communication but it’s initiated from the app end.
The app knows about the streamer as you add it when you first set up the app. The streamer has no idea what devices you have running the app. It only know when one is there when the app tries to communicate with it.
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Hmm, I was expecting Naim to either know the answer, or otherwise have a plausible hypothesis.
It seems to me that what is significant here is the difference between how a playlist plays and how the streamer plays when a file has been chosen through a browse and select (or search). File selection through browse or search is the computer section of the streamer accessing the store drive’s file list and then loading the selected one if it is loaded into streamer’s memory before playing, otherwise loading part into the buffer memory with an instruction to itself to load more as space is released.
How do playlists work? Are they on the store, or on the streamer? Do they provide a list or f files and tell the streamer computer to access in turn, just as any “play next” selection on the streamer, or do they act on the store and say feed next? (I assume the former, but is that correct l?). That also prompts the question how does the “play next” file queuing work,and is if any different from how a playlist wirks? And thence to the OP, do multiple queued files (chosen manually not sequential files in an album) sound any different, as playlists do, of do they sound the same as when selected for direct play?