Spotify Connect
Posted by: james n on 18 February 2014
Coming to Naim digital music players in May 
The box is only a couple of years old and cost an order of magnitude more then many other players that came with this functionality built in years ago.
Clearly the hardware must have been under spec'd. You would have thought/hoped that it would be the oppersite would be true for a supposed premium product.
Consider what a 5 year old smart phone can do. Imagine if you where required to update that with a serial cable every time you want a new feature? Never mind upgrade actual hardware. What a joke!
Although I share your dissapointment concerning Uniti I have to say that regarding updates a five year old smart phone is pretty much useless (I have an iPhone 3G). Ok, I can use it as phone (and SMS) but it is not possible to download new apps or even update the existing ones (this is why I still use fw 3.16 in my Uniti). I guess this is modern world for you — nothing is made to last for more than three years…
The difference with an iPhone is that you cannot upgrade the internal hardware, unlike the streaming module in the original NaimUniti, which had been upgraded twice (analog iPod, digital iPod/96 kHz, digital iPod/192 kHz) along the way.
The other key thing is power envelope–one can't simply drop the fastest processor known to man into an audio device, unless you plan on cooling it with a fan. Embedded processor manufacturers tend to be fairly conservative in this respect.
I don't think anyone is suggesting we need the fastest process "known to man" as obviously anything needing active cooling would be unsuitable for this application.
Since the mid part of the last decade RISK systems on a chip have been more then capable of handing just about anything you throw at them in terms of multimedia. My Uniti uses an ARM chip itself- these aren't expensive or specialist, ARM chips have been commodity hardware since the start of the last decade.
So in my opinion there is simply no excuse for a company of Naims pedigree selling hardware just a couple of years back that isn't capable of handling spotify.