In praise of my 2012 Superuniti…I recently dusted down my SU after 6-7 yrs in storage. I added some new speakers and connected my NAS. Sounds beautiful. For what they are, they sell so cheap on the 2nd hand market. Real bargain/entry level audiophile kit now. And against all my instincts I didn’t think a Powerline Lite would make any difference to my ears…lo and behold the sound is a bit more open with the Powerline lite.
Welcome Action Jackson!
I have to agree on the value offered by the Superuniti family both newly purchased and especially used. I have a Nova and purchased mainly to downsize the box count and to acquire streaming (Tidal). I am approaching 4 years and have used mine virtually everyday except for vacations.
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I don’t believe in all this power lead nonsense, but Naim gave me a free Powerline Lite a few years ago and I tried it on my office SuperUniti.
To my astonishment it did just as you say and when I got my wife to listen as I changed things that I didn’t explain to her, she picked out with the Powerline Lite for the same reason.
Anyway I agree. The SuperUniti is excellent and great value.
I agree, I’ve tried power leads in the past and I’ve never heard any differences. I got this Powerline Lite at a good price and thought I’d give my SU all the help she can get. I was quite impressed with the improvements.
On an optimized network with transcoding enabled, lossless workarounds employed for cloud streaming, and with a powerline, the SU is a pretty great piece of kit, punches way above its weight for a single box.
We still use a SuperUniti in the office. It’s a fabulous one boxer, decent streaming quality and a great power amp section.
However the gap to our lounge system is too large so it will get replaced. Not sure what with yet!
Welcome to the madhouse and enjoy your SuperUniti, it’s a great piece of kit!
I’ve had my SU also since 2012 and its been fantastic. I was offered a terrific tradein against the Atom HE edition by my dealer and that’s the only reason I’m not still keeping it!
I have a Superuniti and think the sound from Tidal is great.
I am however thinking of using a CD transport (such as an Audiolab CDT 6000) with the Superuniti instead - but won’t have the chance to try before I buy.
Have any of you SU users by any chance taken this approach ie used the digital input from a CD transport?
Yes, we had our old Micromega transport connected up to our SU for a while and it worked well.
Using digital input 2 (RCA) with a high quality digital interconnect which was previously used between CD transport and matching Micromega DAC.
Thanks, Iain, that’s really helpful to know. I’m guessing decent transport + internal DAC vs Tidal Hifi + internal DAC ought to come out highly similar…
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I think the SuperUniti shared a DAC chip with other naim models of the time.
It’s really not bad at all.
Obviously DSP is a different chipset to later/improved naim implementation of the 1791.
CD might improve on Tidal I can’t recall. The streaming side of SU was improved upon when we moved to 272 then improved again by NDX2. Tech moves on!
I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with a decent transport.
In that case I think that is the route I will go down! And appreciate the guidance.
Have a great weekend
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Definitly not.
I’m a SU happy owner and I can confirm that a CD transport works much better than Tidal.
Obviously, to be fair you should be sure that the master you’re hearing via Tidal is the same of the CD, but a part from that, in my system CDs win all the time against Tidal.
One quite cheap improvement could be stream via Audirvana (then connected to the SU via UPnP) instead using Tidal directly.
Not only you can listen to MQA, but the very same track streamed via Audirvana is a lot better… Don’t ask me why, but so it is!
I’ve found similar, my ripped CDs sound better than Tidal. Tidal music seems to sound a bit flat compared to my own music collection.
Thanks to everyone who has provided their advice which is much appreciated
Another happy SU user over here. I did use a CD-player into the digital in, hence using the SU’s DAC, and indeed it is better than Tidal. But what even beats this is properly ripped CDs.
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again appreciate the advice but when you say “properly ripped CDs” can I ask how one would go about this? I’ve often wondered but felt somewhat bamboozled by all of the different ways of doing it!
And also clueless as regards methods of storing and easily accessing it all eg would a USB work well, plugged into the front of the SU?
Any guidance would be appreciated
I bought a Uniti Serve on eBay and just finished ripping my CDs. It’s wired into my router and streams to my SU. Sound quality is better than anything I’ve owned before. A joy to use
Two general methods of ripping CDs:
- Buy a hardware device which does it - naim UnitiCore or similar offering from another manufacturer. Core is very expensive compared to latest budget offerings from say Innuos.
- Rip on a PC. Freeware packages or purchase something like dbPowerAmp.
Depends how technical you are, and on the value of convenience. Cost of 2 is cheap if you already have a PC.
If you go down route 1 you’ll have a hardware device which can likely act as a server and provide access to the ripped CDs from your SU.
For route 2 you can store the rips on a HDD/stick and connect via USB but it’s far more convenient to have a server here too - many people have Synology/QNAP NAS with Asset Server for this purpose.
The total cost of a brand new PC, dbPowerAmp licence, a Synology NAS (+hard drives) and an Asset licence is likely half of a UnitiCore, and equivalent to something like an Innuos Zen Mini.