NAIM and Intels Thunderbolt techologie

There are all sorts of possibilities for sure, but I bet not Niam will be th first to jump on the bandwagon .

A pro audio vendor, Universal Audio announced they will use the new technology with their processors and converters and last year at the Intel Developer Conference Intel showed the technology with an Avid Protools audio post production workstation, there is a movie of it on Youtube. Storage, networking, monitoring could be utilised this way quite easily as the Thunderbolt (or LightPeak as Intel named it) is to be considered as the extension of the PCI Express bus (and a Display Port) using Display port connector now and fibre later.

Honestly I do feel for any hifi manufacturer that has delved into computers and all the expectations placed by the customer.

This technology is beyond new.

And anyway why would this be beneficial to audio, where in audio is 10GB/s data transfer required?

Good question.

Probably not 10 Gbps bandwidth is the most important thing for niche markets like the high-end audio, but the implementation of the new technology. It is like the extension of the PCI Express bus, and it is implemented in hardware. So as a transport chain can be easier to implement when the technology is better known and used by lots of vendors for different purposes. It has a good chance to make USB, Firewire and even Gigabit Ethernet completely redundant in the future, especially when it becomes fibre based instead of the present copper implementation and overcome distance limitation. 10 Gbps nature is the easiest to pick up PR wise, but it is not the most important feature as I see.

The question then is do we as users of naim equipment want to see a 6 monthly cycle of changes to say an NDX just so the latest technologies can be put in? 

Should naim for instance plumb all its R&D now into this new device and ditch existing, known, proven tech, tech thats more than capable with overkill of dealing with the very best quality music file?

Again I would question why its important to have ethernet/usb/firewire replaced with one port on a piece of naim audio equipment?

These technologies for sure are exciting. If it 5 years they become defacto (You may recall that apple was the first manufacturer to install USB on a consumer desktop and indeed the first manufacturer to install wireless on laptops.) then fine naim should look at the HDX 2017 model to have this technology.

Whats for certain is even the highest quality music can transfer quite happily over USB, so over kill would be the word here.

Mind you audiophiles have managed to 'hear' differences in USB cables so no doubt because its new and shiny and expensive, it will sound Grrrrreat!

I think non of the high-end audio manufacturers should have to do anything right now. They just have to follow how the pro audio industry and the computer manufacturers will be dealing with the new technology and then use what they think useful. It probably has more PR value at the moment then real benefit. 

Because of the HDX, Naim has quite a bit of experience with PCI Express audio interface board than the majority of the high-end audio vendors and Thunderbolt is mainly a PCI Express extension technology...

If I'm not very much mistaken, one of the selling points of Naim equipment is the ability to service/repair almost everything they've ever made.
I've no idea how new computer interfaces, transfer protocols etc. will fit into this in the long run.
Personally, I update my laptop every few years as its processor starts to struggle. I don't bank on doing it with my hi-fi unless I can get something which sounds better.
I'd be yet to be convinced Thunderbolt will enhance the listening experience.
And I'd always say - beware of new technologies with sexy sounding names!

Thunderbolt is essentially both a means of unifying all the different connections external devices and a way of increasing transfer speeds beyond USB 3 or Firewire 800. For those who work with audio or video disk arrays no doubt it will be a godsend. Since it is designed to daisy chain devices it can carry power as well.



In the computer world anything that reduces cabling and increases data speeds is lovely.



Does it offer anything new to the audiophile using Ethernet to stream - no.

If you are streaming 1028p movies from a DAS possibly.



In the future who knows - who would have thought we'd be using USB?



As William Gibson pointed out "The future is already here, it just not evenly distributed"



Tog

I am just thinking loud. 

The most important feature of the new technology, that you can connect your device directly to the PCI Express bus. So the device do not need any protocol or extra packaging, layer to communicate the computer storage or even a storage directly without a computer (and I mean the NAS, DAS as computers too) and pull the data quickly (10 Gbps !) to the device's memory, not the computer memory first. So the communication between the storage and the decoding device can be more direct, which is not too bad generally, make the path simpler from storage to the device 's memory from a decoding point of view. In the Intel Technology Brief they say one of the most important benefit of the technology is:

- Low latency with highly accurate time synchronization
- Uses native protocol software drivers 

So these again mean simpler path from storage to application. I am sure all the audio solutions can give a good use more accurate time synchronization mechanisms and low latency which mean much better, "real" real-time performance.

Again from Intel:

" ... high-performance, low-power, switching architecture...
... A novel time synchronization protocol that allows all the Thunderbolt products connected in a domain to synchronize their time within 8ns of each other...
... highly efficient, low-overhead packet format with flexible QoS support"

Low power, high performance means high efficiency, which probably will result less radiation, which is very welcome in high-end audio. 

The biggest problem with the present, copper cabling is the maximum length, it is only 3m if I read it well, will be much longer only with optical cables.