NDX chat event outcome?

Still available here, Recent Activity > All Chat Events > Previous Chat Events:

https://forums.naimaudio.com/st...ent/3819189067183498

Incidentally, I see that the page Naim have called 'Recent Activity' is the forum's real home page, https://forums.naimaudio.com/home. Which makes more sense...

Thank you Chief Chirpa - just what I needed.

Really interesting.......these chat events are a really welcome addition!

I was on for half an hour.  Very interesting but this being mostly new info to me I'll wait a while.  I do want to replace my tuner that only does FM.     the NDX will provide so much more.

I agree with Jack, good addition, and a good read.

I've currently got both a UnitiServe and an NS01 at home. Interestingly, for me, I can now easily pick flac from WAV using these front ends; couldn't with my laptop/hiface.

I'm currently doing some more detailed comparisons between the stand-alone rips and the Naim rips, i.e. How does the quality compare if I simply decompress the flac back to WAV - vs - Naim?

If Naim 'wins' I will be re-ripping all my CDs, using whichever of these I decide to buy - as I think I probably will now ......DAMN.

Makes me wonder how the quality of the rips will influence the results people get from the NDX.

Or, maybe, if the Naim rips DON'T win I park the NS01/US and try a NDX! My brain hurts.

M

That would be an interesting test. There would have to be some serious audiophile voodoo going on if you felt your decompressed FLACs sounded worse than Naim WAV rips, provided the FLACs were bit-perfect rips in the first place of course. The key test is to do a binary compare on the two WAVs. If the data is the same, they are going to sound the same.

Naim ripping has come too late for me and it's currently too closed (i.e. WAV only with proprietary, albeit excellent, meta-data). I've already ripped to FLAC + MP3 with EAC/REACT2 and my collection serves Squeeboxes, media players, PC audio with Foobar and iPods. Naim is wisely adding the ability to rip to a portable format in a future release of the server products but I won't be re-ripping my collection. That said, I am very interested to hear the NDX and to do the FLAC vs. WAV comparison to see how much you really are losing.

Mr U. and Adrian_P -

I do recall a thread, but could not find it via search, where someone did a binary comparison between WAV files created by 1) some basic ripper (MediaMonkey, iTunes?), 2) a more advanced ripper with verification -- EAC, and 3) a Naim ripping engine (HDX?  UnitiServe?), and proclaimed there were no differences.

Since then, that test has been referenced multiple times.  Darn, I wish I could find it!

Mr U. -

Before you launch into such a long, time-consuming re-ripping process, I would think that now would be a good time to do this test again.   I did a quick google, and there appears to be a number of MS utilities as well as 3rd-party products for doing binary comparisons (eg, Araxis's Merge). 

It is likely that Naim players have been optimized for WAV versus FLAC playback, but it would be interesting to prove whether that is a function of the rips themselves.

Even if the files are the same, I would not say that is a reason to avoid the UnitiServe (and, possibly, NDX).   If WAV playback through these products sounds best to your ears, then go for it!   But you could possibly save yourself a ton of work by simply transcoding your FLAC files back to WAV versus re-ripping from CD!

Thanks and good luck!

Hook

The CD used for the test must not have had pre-emphasis or pregap (hidden) tracks.

Hi Guys,

I started another thread so that Razor's didn't get Hijacked.

M