I’m reading more and more here on the forum, worrying thoughts regarding the legacy streamers and the possibility of them losing the ability to stream from internet services such as Tidal and the like in the future.
Have I got this right? I just purchased an NDS, picking it up today. Do you see that it will be obsolete regarding streaming services in the near future because of technological advances or do you think the possibility to stream will continue to work?
It seems a high price to pay if these architectures go out of time and stop functioning. It would of course be true for the new platform too. Even though it would last a bit longer.
Absolutely not. The technology might advance but it does not leave the previous to become unusable.
Naim have a reputation for excellent long term support of legacy product. It’s not able to ‘match’ the new platform features, but what it does, it does very well & I have obsolete confidence that it’s rock solid & that Naim will continue to support it into the foreseeable future.
Naim may continue to support the parts they develop but underlying this you have a number of dependencies. The DAC chips and processing DSP chips as examples which at some point may go out of manufacturing.
Then you have the fact that services like Qobuz and Tidal are provided by a 3rd party supplier, so at some point they may decide to support a different codec or file format for example or modify their authentication api’s, database behaviours or app interaction as a process to improve the user experience with better features, security or performance as examples.
The previous generation of hardware will likely work to a reasonable level for some time to come of course but bare in mind the same software engineers that are supporting new customers on new hardware are also being expected to indefinitely support the older hardware, eventually priorties get in the way of customer satisfaction and the willingness to support products (in software updates) that are discontinued naturally diminishes, these are economic and supply chain factors rather than customer relations or support based.
All are replaceable with new revisions or other brands, the technology fundamentally remains unchanged.
All very true, but the previous generation will continue to work for some time to come. Any such change to new systems that supersede previous systems has always been market led.
Whatever happens with any online streaming services in the future, the streamers will always be able to work as originally intended - i.e. as streamers for locally stored content and as DACs.
Yes, but Spotify was fairly new on the scene though and back then and nobody was yet buying just to stream from online services as the quality was nowhere near streaming from local storage. It was more of a bonus feature than the main reason to buy.
@Richard.Dane further clarifies my otherwise relevant points in so much as someone looking to buy one of those now mostly discontinued first generation streamers are potentially going to have the expectation that the services they currently support will be continually updated with future software releases which given the fact they are provided by a third party and not developed, maintained and supported directly by Naim, rather they are an integration based on those providers SDK’s, are not guaranteed to be perpetually supported, software support cycles will typically take a natural cycle through their lifetime dependant on the capabilities of the physical hardware and components that run them.
The dependency on component materials supply and associated buffer stock means there will come a time when the supplier of those components determines it doesn’t make economic sense to continue to allocate a factory slot to make more new ones at which point you are reliant on the stock already in the supply chain and ODM’s own buffer stocks.
The low level driver and firmware code for components usually has a depreciating support cycle as well so even if features are supportable with a software update then the silicon may not have a suitable firmware or driver revision to take advantage of them.
The point on UPnP and Local streaming is entirely relevant and is far less dependant on external forces and unlikely to depreciate in the serviceable life of the first generation Naim streaming products.
Mr M, the point I was trying to make is that the big unknown is how streaming services will develop in future. Nobody has a crystal ball on this. Naim will, I’m sure, support as long as practicable, but the onus does somewhat rest in the hands of the streaming services themselves. The good news though is that, whatever happens with online streaming services in future, any of the streamers will work with streaming locally stored content and all work as excellent DACs too so additional devices can be added as required and take advantage of the Naim performance as a DAC.
Couple of thoughts:
The “old” platform, nds/ndx can still be fed qobuz etc either by an external hardware or software solution, be it a bridge of some kind or using bubbleupnp.
Any platform is reliant on qobuz/tidal/roon etc not going bust!
But as previously mentioned, local streaming should always work.
I have my NDS operating within a Roon environment, so that the Tidal and Qobuz integration is handled by the Roon Core, and just a playback stream is sent to the NDS, which is subsequently sent to it as a UPnP input (as if it had come from a UPnP server).
This isolates the NDS from future service changes, format changes (I can play DSD128, DSD256, DSD512, 24/384, 24/352.8 and 32-bit formats) etc.
Sounds wonderful too.
