naim nvi

no.

AV2 has 7.1 analogue inputs - not that that is any help to you.

I did a home demo of an Oppo BD93, with it live downmixing HD audio into DTS, plumbed into the coax input if my n-Vi. I then compared this with using an AVR400 to do what my n-Vi was doing. 

In this case, decoding the audio (this time via Coax, HDMI, and also the Oppo's analogue multichannel out) and with the AVR running centre, rears, sub, and preouts to the rest of my naim system. 

Worst sound was Oppo coax to AVR400. 

Next up, Oppo HDMI to AVR400. 

Using the Oppo's internal decoding to run analogue into the AVR was better still, and this is how an AV2 user might consider hooking the Oppo to their kit. 

However, I still found that my first attempt of hooking the Oppo coax to my n-Vi gave the best sound. I guess the naim is just better at getting the extra out of DTS than the Arcam or the Oppo could get out of an HD track. 

Actually it isn't really that surprising... DVD-A and SACD should really sound better than CD... But have you ever heard an SACD player give a more musical rendition of the hybrid disk of "Dark Side of the Moon" than a CDX2 could give from the CD layer of the same disk?

For reference, IF I wanted BluRay, I'd opt for the Oppo and just plug it in, but with only 3 BDs in my library to date, I'm not buying a player yet. I shall continue to purchase "triple play" packs, and when I have 20 or 30 BD titles then the Oppo stands a great chance of being the next addition to my system. 

I should also point out that with the audio from my Tivo box, the Arcam was ok, but lagged behind the n-Vi. For playback of my DVD collection, the Arcam again lagged behind. Using the Oppo to spin DVDs gave a slightly crisper image due to the onboard scaling. However, the colour pallette and "filmic" look the n-Vi offers still won out, and whilst audio from the Oppo's Coax was impressive when fed to the n-Vi, it still lost out to the audio from spinning the disc in the n-Vi's drive. 

P.S. This may also be useful for you blurum66: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation

thanks mike for that very interesting i guess naim did not bank on the fact that hd audio would never be able to be sent optically or digitaly by coax due to piracy they would have had to make it analogue or hdmi but hdmi was just a later late for this amp but i guess they could have given analogue just in case  i guess this amp will decode dts better than what some amps decode hd audio but it would always be a niggling thought that i would want hd audio decoded so i am thinking of another amp its just that these amps are selling for a lot less second hand . thanks for you reply

OK, so lossless audio, that is Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, cannot be sent over a TOSLINK or S/PDIF interface.  The bit rate of lossless audio is too high for these interfaces, you need HDMI (or in theory discrete inputs for each of the 7.1=8 channels, a 7x power amps) and the Naim n-Vi has 'just' 5x power amp channels and it doesn't have any HDMI ports.  So whether or not the software can support these codecs is moot, you can't get the signal into the box.

In short the n-Vi was designed and released before lossless audio over HDMI became prevalent.  The investment needed to create an 'n-Vi 2' with all this stuff is pretty high so I assume it's why Naim have exited this market space.

That all said I still like my n-Vi, as a DTS/AC-3 5.1 amp it still gives a great sound.