I’m not going to pretend this is a review or anything like that, but for £70 this is an amazing value box and I can see abandoning Qobuz streaming as a real possibility for me now.
So for people who never read a thread from the top, Presto (a CD, vinyl and download store in UK covering classical and jazz music) started a high res streaming service about a year ago. It costs about the same as a Qobuz subscription. There is a nice app which doesn’t present you with hundreds of rock and pop albums that you will never want to hear - it’s just classical and jazz. The curation and editorial content is interesting and helpful. About a week ago Presto started promoting their own brand streamer which they sell for just over £70. They have several different country options for the power supply, but at the end of the day the streamer needs a 5V 1A supply by way of a Micro-USB socket.
The streamer itself is a small black box, 95mm x 53mm x 18 mm. It has the power socket, a 3.5mm analogue socket and a Toslink optical socket. There is a button which can be used with a router that has a WPS button for setup and also by pressing it longer, for reset. There is an almost invisible blue status light.
Setting it up with an iPhone or Android phone running the Presto app is very simple. The unit has to be connected to your WiFi and only works with 802.11 b/g/n 2.4 GHz.
You can choose to connect the streamer to a Naim device by analogue which uses two RCA plugs, but you could change that lead for a 3.5 mm to DIN if you want to. I chose to connect using the provided optical lead to a digital input on my Nova. I thought the analog feed was ok but nothing special. The optical feed sounds just as I would expect, as it’s using the Nova’s DAC to convert to analogue audio. Multiroom to my office SuperUniti and the 272 in our sitting room worked fine.
The Presto streamer works up to 192/24 and the Presto streaming service provides the highest res that they have available, which is always at least CD quality and higher for many recordings.
The way you use the streamer is to select the digital input (and adjust the volume) in the Naim app and then choose what you want to listen to in the Presto app. The wanted music is sent to the streamer from their servers via your WiFi, so you can turn the phone off or whatever if you want. If you do that and then turn it on again, the Presto app picks up where you left off and you can see in the Now Playing screen in the Presto app where the album has got to and what’s coming next.
My hearing is not good enough these days for me to be able to comment on sound quality at all critically and people who follow what I write here on the forum may have noticed that I almost never say anything about sound quality. But to me this streamer sounds excellent. Also I am very sensitive to unwanted distortion and I am not hearing any at all. It all sounds very clean to me.
Earlier in the thread I mentioned that the only issue I ran into was that I was getting a lot of buffering over the WiFi connection, despite having a very good broadband connection and this streamer being the only 2.4 GHz WiFi device in the house. The two existing WiFi access points were four metres and 8 metres away from the streamer. Giving it its own WiFi Access Point sited only 40 cm away from the streamer totally fixed the buffering issue. (I would rather hardwire the Ethernet but the streamer doesn’t have an Ethernet socket.)
Anyway my overall conclusion is that this is excellent value and does exactly what you hope for almost no money, a lot less than a BlueSound Node for example. Whether the Presto app suits you is something you have to decide for yourself. But personally it does suit me and I am very pleased with the whole thing.
I’m happy to answer questions if I can and would also be glad to read what others think of this, if they try the app and/or the streamer.
It occurs to me that it is probably worth adding that when you are away from your streamer, the Presto app will look for Bluetooth and AirPlay connections or play to your phone, so it’s great for having music on the move too.
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