NDX as digital source tho external DAC

Urm - HDX as a digistream to the NDS could be a more relevant point to consider?

HI AMA, Digital player or Streamer still need sometime to develop to resolve the jitter similar as CD player. Especially the USB input and output, it is convenient but if you choose with no compromise with the sound quality guess it still need sometime to get this technology to mature.......

Always the digital streamer or player giving me less music involving than CD player. I still prefer to CD player rather than Digital Streamer, may be I am wrong but this is what I got so far.

AMA, I wish I had tried this when I was reviewing mystreaming options. You might even find it gets closer to the NDS with two power supplies, as the electronics required to drive the Ethernet are move away to another box.

Certainly the NDAC/555PS truly benefits from the NDX. Of course the other combo I wished i tried was the NDS into NDAC/555PS... But I hadn't enough power supplies to try it.

Simon

Interesting opinion -- do you think HDX has superior digital output than NDX?

BNN, I can't agree with above.

The fact that you find CD555 superior to some streamers does not mean that CD555 jitter handling is better than, let's say, NDS.

This is just that some really advanced CD players -- like CD555 -- have such a state of the art DAC section that they can beat many streamers.

But surely in terms of jitter even cheap streamers are bit-perfect and hardly flip any single bit.

The sad story starts when streamer engages S/PDIF generator to send the bitstream outside. 

The bitsream waveform is seriously compromised so that external DAC can struggle to decode some bits of the bitstream despite theoretically "bit-perfect transmission".

afaik the industry best digital sources -- like Meridian, dCS -- actually copy CD data to a memory buffer and starting from that point the rest of the chain is identical to any streamer. This negates the difference between CD or streamer as the digital source.

My question is if I want to use an external DAC -- let's say dCS Scarlatti -- what Naim streamer will do a better job to fill it in?

HDX? NDX?

What's the difference between NDS/XPS and NDS/555 as the digital source?

As an added consideration I think that the NDX is limited to 96/24 output on its digital output and so won't be able to pass 192/24 files to an external DAC (although it can play such files). Admittedly there aren't many 192/24 files but I have at least one (Forcione & Sciubba). I'm not sure if the HDX is better or whether this is a 'software limit' which Naim will resolve in future upgrades.

May not bother you but as my Naim DAC can accept 192/24 input I would prefer a streamer able to pass that signal on.

In Native mode the NDX will pass 24/192 to an external DAC so no limitations there.

Great - thanks, that is good to hear. I was looking at the online manual for the NDX/ND5 where native is indicated at 96/24 - perhaps this relates to the old version of the NDX. Also a review in Hi-Fi World states that the digital output fell silent with 192/24 on the ND5. No idea why they had problems...

I must admit your post did make me check that i was getting the full fat 24/192 in native mode. Just to be sure i played the  24/192 version of MMIL and it showed up as the right sampling rate on my amps display 

And what had your ears told you? Could you hear a difference in SQ?

Yes, it sounds like your manual refers to an early NDX with the original streaming board that was limited to reduced playlist size and 96kHz sample rate. 

Between what ?