I recently downloaded the latest Wolf Alice album “The Clearing” from qubuz as hires WAV.
Copied it to my Naim Core (latest firmware and 4TB Samsung SSD).
On playback on my ND555 (latest firmware), it stops playback at the end of track 8 (of 11 tracks). The app and the screen on the ND555 still show it as playing, although it does not progress beyond the end of track 8. It also becomes fairly unresponsive in the app. If i leave it alone, after about 10 minutes is does start playing track 9, but stuttering, like 1 sec of audio, pause for a second then another second of audio. Finally it then plays tack 10 and 11 just fine.
I then tried playing back on a Muso2QB, this also plays fine up to the end of track 8 then stops and does not recover.
Now the really interesting bit, is that if i play the album back on my old NAC272 (latest firmware) or one of my Qute2’s (latest firmware) the whole album plays fine without hesitation.
Just to check there was not something odd about the storage on the Core, i deleted the album, waited a while for the Core to see it had gone then recopied it over. But still get the same results, so i don’t think its a weird SSD data retrieval issue.
I am re-downloading it now. note that the qobuz downloader downloads as FLAc and then transposes to whatever your chosen target file format is. I will try and compare the track 8/9 files from the original to the new to see if they appear different.
re-downloaded the album from quboz as WAV and did a bit level file compare, no difference to original and new copies.
I also tried playing back the album on the Core over coax s/pdif to the ND555, all plays ok that way.
So something odd with the network streaming module in the ND555 and Muso2QB.
I recently bought a 2nd hand Atom on ebay, which is due to arrive on Thursday, will be interesting to see how that behaves presumably as one of the newer streamers it will also show the oddity.
Streaming it direct from Qobuz, its works fine (i assume direct streaming is using FLAC).
The WAV files are downloaded to a Windows 11 desktop PC before being copied onto the Naim Core, so i have also just successfully played the WAV version of the album via Windows Media player, output via USB to a DAC-V1.
Definitely just seems to be a problem with the newer Naim streamers and this particular albums WAV files.
Another thing you could try just to narrow things down is a different UPnP server. If you can run one on a NAS or PC, point it at the offending album either on the Core or other storage, and see if the ND555 can then cope with it.
Also navigate to the files using a computer. Have a close look at each track and it’s metadata and see if you can spot any minor differences that might be upsetting the streamer.
Another thing to try would be to take one of those recalcitrant FLAC files and transcode it to WAV and back to FLAC again using one of the usual programs. Then put it back into the Core. Does it play properly now?
The Atom that i had bought turned up yesterday, without its remote, (which is now following on), but i manged to get it setup just using the app. As i expected it has the same odd behaviour as the the ND555.
As suggested by Fatcat, i re-ordered the tracks in the playing queue and moved track 9 above track 8. The problem stayed with track 9, so its not something at the end of track 8 causing issues it is the start of track 9 (“Midnight Song”) that caused the problem.
Last night i redownloaded the album from Quboz as Flac and replaced the WAV version of the album on my Core with the Flac version which plays ok without any issues. So definitely just a wav version problem.
Given that there is no real audio differences between the flac or wav version i will just leave it now as the flac version.
I think early 1st gen Naim streamers handled WAV files a little bit better than FLAC (some have said). I doubt there is any difference to be heard with 2nd gen and NC, although I have no direct experience.
With my 272, WAV was definitely a little better than FLAC so I had things set up to transcode on the fly. With my Atom I couldn’t hear a difference between them. A few people on the forum have preferred WAV to FLAC, even with 2nd gen streamers, but most seem to have shared my experience.