In response to Tidal and Naim support pointing me to the 4.7.1 firmware, I updated last night and touch wood since then there hasn’t been an issue. It got through the whole of the new Fat Cops album without issue (recommended btw) and for the last 20+ minutes I’ve left it playing a Tidal playlist that it couldn’t manage on Saturday morning but is now ok with.
The f/w prompted the 272 to reboot a few times and ends with a full factory reset, which is a nuisance losing all my radio presets and input configurations. Radio 4 dropped out a couple of times earlier on but a full network recycle in the correct order seems to have resolved that.
I’m still expecting it to fail, and a quiet Wednesday morning isn’t the same test that it’ll be tonight when the country finishes school & work and swamps the internet with Youtube & iPlayer streams. Fingers crossed tho.
Good info. and, if true, could certainly explain the issues being seen. Don’t quote me on this but I’d think AWS would have better distribution and connectivity than Akamai. Wikipedia seems to infer that AWS has a larger market share… not to say Akamai are small. However I can perfectly understand teething issues with a change over like this.
I believe the 4.7.1 and 4.7.0 is the same, just that it is an APAC and Europe version of F/W respectively. As I had this issue once where the .0 was installed and I can’t seem to load the chinese characters on the Naim.
When I was looking at this a couple of years ago, Tidal was at least using Akamai for their server platforms then. Can’t remember them using AWS or Azure for media spooling… but that’s not to say they are not as well… perhaps in a balanced multi vendor setup for media spooling… which is how I would consider doing it.
Also as far as I am aware there is no change in format in lossy streaming… it’s still AAC, but it would appear Tidal are now aligning with the industry/standardised way of streaming it within a MP4 container… the media format, meta data encoding etc are identical… it’s just wearing a different coat.
FWIW still not experienced one single Tidal dropout or glitch in the last 2 months since I have owned myNDX2
I could have said the same thing until last night. Had a TIDAL drop out on my ND555. About 10 hours of listening before that, and no dropouts. I suppose it could be something with my network provider. Just providing this info to help debug what is going on. It does not bother me much. When I am on TIDAL, I am in discover mode, and when I find something I really like, I download in Hi Rez.
I am hard wired.
About to connect the Cisco 2960 Catalyst and Cat 5e cables experiment–as soon as I finish my package for my accountant.
The new streaming architecture spools and buffers at the application level , so dropouts wont occur in the same way as the legacy streamers where the issue is tcp related latency or limited tcp segment buffering. If there is a dropout on the new streamers then your buffer has been exhausted which is many many seconds long. This would only happen if there is some sort of catastrophic failure in connectivity throughput or you have very low throughput due to access contention.
I use Tidal a lot on my next gen streamer… and never had a dropout in 2.5 months. I have had the very occasional issue of early track ending on replay, but not in recent weeks. On my first gen streamer dropouts occurred frequently so I used a proxy media server to mitigate.
We have been working on accumulating evidence on this one as it’s quite a complex one. Over the last few days have got hold of some Wiresharks that catch it in the act and we have been in detailed discussions with Tidal engineering.
As of tonight Tidal has switched the Naim account to a different CDN (Content delivery network), as the Wiresharks strongly suggest there is an issue on the new CDN when a track slowly streams across the network over the full length of the track. This is the case when using Bridgeco streaming IC based products like the Muso, Qb and classic uniti / streamer range.
For clarity the new streaming product range (Atom, Star, Nova, ND5XS2, NDX2 and ND555) work in a different way and burst read the data from the server into RAM as quickly as possible. This means that within around 10secs we are no longer talking to the Tidal CDN - pull the network plug out and it will continue to the end of the track.
On those who have been having this problem, could you power cycle your units to ensure that they are talking to this alternative CDN and see how things go. Naturally the internet has its ups and downs at times, but lets get a tone if this has done the trick or not.
If you wish to contact me privately on this subject, you can email me at steve.harris (at) naimaudio.com
Firstly, a big thank you for popping into the thread to update us with a detailed explanation, that’s much appreciated and very professional.
Secondly, I can report, that I re-powered my Uniti2 and it is streaming Tidal perfectly. I have tried the same album that wan’t getting through the first track, and I am well through the full album - so well done.
Yes, as Steve said it will return Tidal playback to how it was a few months back so the previous Naim optimisations for the legacy streamers should help again. It won’t magically fix the legacy issues that occur for some for with the older streamers, but should restore Tidal to previous performance you were experiencing. If so or not please let Steve/Naim know.
It looks like the anomaly that was shared in the trace shared by a forum member was not a one-off but symptomatic of the issue in hand.
Apart from a brief evening of regular dropouts about a month ago, my NDX has been unaffected by this whole dropout issue since the day I bought it, so I’m hoping this situation will continue!