Yesterday I went to my dealer to get some input on roonifying the NDS. He said that Roon worked with UPnP and that the streamer didn’t have to be Roon ready. I countered with discussions from the forum claiming you need some sort of bridge be it software or hardware.
Now, if Roon is installed on a computer, can you then use it to play music on the NDS over the network without a bridge?
If you can is it RAAT that you can’t utilize if you don’t have a bridge and is that, if a fact, detrimental to sound quality?
This is, for me, weirdly complictated and though I use bubble from time to time it’s not a stable sollution.
Roon has it’s own way of sending music to a streamer called RAAT. Roon say that it’s an improvement over UPNP and by and large it is but at the expense of compatibility.
To use Roon without a bridge to an NDS would require a Roon endpoint (i.e. player/streamer) that could output via SPDIF. This would then feed the Naim streamer and you would use the NDS as a DAC only.
The issue with this is that you are at the mercy of the quality of the Roon endpoint and as many of us have found out the transport is very key to the ultimate quality of the sound, especially at the level of the NDS. To do this really well is likely to require significant investment in a Roon endpoint which may or may not sound as good as the streamer section of the NDS. If you are going to do this you might as well change to a next generation Naim streamer that can be a Roon endpoint, although to maintain the quality of the NDS will require an upgrade to its replacement, the mighty ND555.
The way round this is to use a bridge. There are 2 bridges commonly used in these circles. The first is a pre-built hardware bridge from Sonore, the second is a software solution called lms-to-upnp. There are also some products available that combine the server and bridge, these are the Audiostore devices that some people use that incorporate the bridge into the product.
All the bridges work in a similar way.
Roon supports the old Logitech Squeezebox devices and the bridge pretends to be one of those and then outputs what it receives from Roon as a UPNP signal which the NDS and any of the other streamers can handle.
The bridge outputs the signal as PCM which means that it’s already effectively already transcoded if you are playing say a FLAC file or streaming from Tidal/QoBuz. There is NO loss of sound quality that I can detect having done a lot of listening before taking the plunge. Also Tidal/QoBuz sound as good as locally stored music.
I use the free lms-to-upnp software running in a container on my NAS. Roon is then on a separate server, an NUC running Roon Core which is their turnkey operating system/server solution. This works like an appliance and is maintenance free.
I’ve found doing this well worth the effort. It turns Naim’s second best streamer into a Roon endpoint with no loss of quality and brings in the world of 2 internet music services at no loss of quality. If you spend some time getting to understand Roons feature set you end up with a user experience nothing can match.
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Thank you! That´s exactly how I understood it from previous discussions on this topic. Got a bit confused when the dealer said Roon could send via UPnP not using RAAT.
I´ve read the threads on lms-to-upnp but the step-by-step instructions makes no sense since I don´t really understand the language (computish😁)
No he claimed it could send not using RAAT
I second this, when the similar SonoreUPnP bridge is used.
I also have the lms-to-upnp software running on a RPi and the results are the same.
This type of solution is not going to be commonly understood by Dealers, never mind suggested/supported. They will shove you done the formal tickboxed route, i.e. if you want Roon it has to be a Roon endpoint, which from a NDS means an upgrade to a ND555.
However it is still proven that the ND555 using Roon is its optimal input, given the extra processing which, as we were always told by Naim, intoduces additional noise, and how a NDS with UPnP Bridge (the Bridge is presenting WAV format to the NDS which requires no additional processing, as we were told by Naim in the past) compares to ND555 from the same Roon Core based environment in the same system.
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What would be super, but is highly unlikely to happen would be for Naim to introduce a Roon only firmware version for the legacy streamers as an alternative to the regular UPNP firmware with iRadio, Spotify and Tidal. This would turn them into Roon endpoints ONLY. This would be necessary due to the limited capacity of the legacy units.
At some point in the far future I’m sure we will find that Spotify or Tidal change their requirements and these services will stop working. Moving all the functionality to Roon would overcome this issue, albeit Roon doesn’t support Spotify but it does have QoBuz.
If someone could do a step-by-step for lms-to-upnp for dummies that would be beyond welcome and seriously appreciated by me😊
It would require explaning the various words used as well. For instance, I don´t know the meaning of almost any of the words aplicable to writing code or working in sub systems or writing scripts. I don´t even know what a script is.
I use a MacBook
Unfortunately not. Do I need one, which?
Given the price of the NDS maybe they should get that kind of firmware for us😊
No, you don’t need one, but if you already had one and it could have run containers it’s really easy to get lms-to-upnp working within a container running Logitech Media Server. It’s not worth getting one just for this though.
You can run on a Mac, somebody has done this quite recently if you search the forum. I’m not a Mac person so will be of limited use here.
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Just buy a Sonore UPnP Bridge and be done with it. Plug it into your network, and your Roon Core will work with your NDS. In that context, it’s a cheap fix and it avoids all that messing around with software that you don’t understand.
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As @trickydickie says @Lucifer, I’m running the lms-to-UPnP on my Mac Mini and, as a backup, on my MacBook Pro.
The steps are straightforward if you have used the terminal app within OSX. This app is bit like tinkering with a car’s engine rather than getting it serviced at a garage. There is plenty of guidance on the web, and on here. I used my learning experience with Raspberry Pi to give me confidence in using the OSX terminal. I would recommend doing this because it will familiarise you with the necessary steps that I outline below (I have the details written down on another computer, I’ll see if I can add them to this).
The sequence of events, IIRC, I went thru’ is something like this:
- Download the current zip file for lms-to-UPnP from sourceforge.
- Create a directory in your application folder called UPnPbridge, with a sub folder called Bin.
- Copy files from the zip folder to your application folder.
- In their terminal app navigate to the UPnPBridge folder (I did this using the cd command, but you can use a utility like folder to do this).
- Run the appropriate file - when the zip file is unpacked there are many operational files that relate to particular operating systems. The OSX file is called squeeze2upnp-OS X-multi.
- The squeeze file needs to be run first with some switches, instructions, that create a config file. A couple of lines in the config file need to be change, this is done in a file editor (can be done within the folder app). Once this is done the squeeze file is run again.
- As the squeeze file runs you will see in the terminal app a list of the devices that will now be able to use Roon. And in the Roon interface these will appear as zones.
I’m sure that there are more competent people out there in the forum than me that can give precise details on each step. Good luck
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I’m at it but getting closer and closer to purchasing a Sonore UPnP bridge. Cause I don’t see no zip files. But I quite enjoy fiddling with things like this and learning new things. The picture shows what’s in the Bin folder in the download directory.
In the other folders there is no zip files either
Is that what I’ve done? See, that me being computer savvy
Now it looks like this, once I gave permission to the file.
Now like this. Unable to play other than through the macbook speakers
The error you are getting relates to the permissions in the bin directory not allowing config file to be written.
I don’t know enough commands in unix to advise how to change them correctly.
Sorry
CK
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There is guidance on changing permissions on RPi thread.
I had a similar problem …
I can’t track my record of how I did it, but I’ll keep searching.
Sounds like you are making good progress. Don’t loose patience!
I hope Martin at Audiostore was helpful.
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