Hi All,
Regarding Naim’s product upgrade policy. We are one of the few manufacturers who support their high tech products well outside of the mandatory warrant period. We don’t have a forced obsolescence policy, but rather the natural decline of what can be done on a give technology platform more dictates where we implement new functionality to ensure our products are competitive.
Naim develop product platforms which means when we update 1 product, we inherently update all the others in the range from it being common. It makes it cost effective to keep the software platform maintained, as development costs can be spread across all products. Big software updates cost £100000’s to do, so we need to be very pragmatic as a business on what we do and when.
So far we have had two major platforms:
2008 - today - Bridgeco. Used in all ‘green screen’ classic series products, then Muso and Qb MK1. In 2012 we tweaked the hardware to give it 192kHz support, plus a bit more processing power so it can handle the newer wave of streaming trends. There was a hw upgrade program so old units could be updated for a very sensible price.
2017-today - NP800. A custom streaming module which has replaced the Bridgeco solution and used in Atom, Nova NDX2, ND555 etc. Has 5x the processing power, 16x more RAM than Bridgeco, 802.11ac wifi, high performance networking stack and generally everything is better. For high def streaming services, anything needing secure processing or very accurate latency for streaming then this platform is far more suitable than the Bridgeco.
When we designed NP800, we also ensured that when old and new platform products were used in the same system, they all work together. So multiroom network discovery, airplay2 support, iOS and Android App etc. As a piece of engineering it’s a lot of effort and work to factor in design decisions made 13yrs ago.
So in practice, on the Bridgeco platform products you will more see bug fixes or existing services library updates rather than new streaming features. We still have all the necessary people in-house and with third parties to support the Bridgeco based products though.
Our last big engineering project on Bridgeco was Airplay2, which ensured the Muso/Qb MK1 had the latest streaming features from Apple. Most other manufacturers just changed their hardware/products to make it easier to support Airplay2.
Hope that clarifies the situation
Best regards
Steve Harris
Software Director
PS. Same is true on servers. Last year we did version 1.7C for Unitiserve/HDX to resolve an issue where Rovi had switched off their CD lookup servers + we swept up various small bugs. Those products are over 10 years old, on a platform that is 14 years old from a third party tech company that is no longer in business.