Naim- Is AirPlay coming or not?

An AE in front of the Nait is good for the wife and kids to listen to Spotify and Pandora via Airplay.  As for myself I want to listen to my FLAC rips.  The AE will not play my FLAC files via UpnP.

If the system was only being used to listen to compressed streams (Spotify, MOG, Pandora etc.) then I would not go through this aggravation and just buy any old piece of junk (after all the streams are only 320).  I myself want to listen to my FLAC Rips (and not low bit rate streams like Spotify).  The system needs to be able to do both.

The Nait 5i came up as it is relatively inexpensive and appears to offer more power and better performance than the Qute.  Things get complicated with it as two boxes now come into play - the Nait and a source.

At best, that's a fragment of an answer that suggests a fundamental weakness in Naim's technology.

Kids are running AirPlay on £35 RaspberryPis and my Airport dates from 2004… both appear to work without too any traumas. It's a bit of a reach to suggest that Naim can't keep pace with either of those…

I'm guessing that the inability to easily apply software updates to Naim hardware is the root cause of the problem here, rather than the regularity of Apple changes…

Simon

Yes, Naim is living in the 1990s in terms of how their hardware is updated. My one year old ND5 XS requires a serial port for updates. That went out with the floppy drive and printer parallel cables. 

Gregg, UPNP is quite a diverse flexible set of protocols that is not specific to home multimedia. DLNA is a profile or subset of UPNP aimed for the domestic multimedia market to aid interoperability.

Simon

Simon

Thank you for the reply

Race

Could not agree more.  Just about impossible for someone like me (and you) who run Mac's.  Even with VMWareFusion to run Windows how in the world would we connect a RS232 cable to our Macs?

Gregg

The ND5 XS actually accepts a USB cable, but it uses a serial protocol to actually communicate with some Windows software. 

Dear Naim...1995 called. They want their firmware update software back. 

Why assume that Naim "can't" implement AirPlay, just because they haven't?

And why assume that they haven't due to something to do with their software update protocols?

Seem like two BIG assumptions.

Far bigger assumption is that naim does this stuff itself. It doesnt. It uses a number of 3rd party suppliers as ODM sources, as indeed it rightly should. It makes no sense to implement technology like Airplay itself if it can buy solutions off the shelf. Sure, some stuff is best done in-house -- DSP work. DAC design and so forth. 

Unitiqute et alia use a board from Audivo (www.audivo.com). This has been mentioned on this forum under the guise of the "audivo board upgrade for unitiqute". Now if Audivo were promising airplay and now cant deliver, its not exactly Naims fault. The only "blame" is going with the wrong vendor, and even that is a complex mix of deliverables, support, pricing, time to market and so forth. 

If naim are to blame, it likes to maintain the impression that it does do everything itself. Sometimes this is clearly not the case (the internals of an HDX, for example). And sometimes its a bit woolly -- try asking where all the Naim for Bentley stuff is made. I understand why they do this, and I would do the same in their shoes -- maintaining a public face as a small firm is not easy. Maybe Naim should have been clearer about what it can and cannot deliver and when, but it never said i would get Unitiqute Airplay, and maybe there is some other way of implementing it within the box. 

I long ago learned not to buy something on the basis of future promises of upgrades and new capabilities. I have spent most of my working life doing R&D and beta testing of hardware and software, and have lived in a fog of half formed claims and even weaker deliverables. Today, the only thing that really matters to me is the shrinkwrapped result. Anything else is jam. 

So my unitiqute wont do Airplay? OK, I wanted it, and still do, but I will do a work around. 

cat bag out !

what an interesting post Jon!

the emperor buys his clothes from Marks and Sparks.

anymore beans to spill perchance?