Mu so
Posted by: rupert on 13 September 2014
Hope spelled it right it seems we might be getting spotify on our super unites this thing called a Muso as got it ,Naim needs to move with the times we pay a lot of money for their gear .
Yes Spotify needs to move with the times and start offering lossless especially with a purchased subscription. Certainly a lot of kudos building for this sentiment on the Spotify community forum... A suspicion is many of the Spotify 'masters' would not do justice to lossless.... and you have WiMP and Qobuz snapping at their heels.
Unfortunately without innovation Spotify will be marginalised.. As new entrants join the market.
Naim need to keep the services interface and APIs easy to develop or even licence to third parties.. There will be a lot of comings and goings in the internet streaming space I suspect..
Indeed. Tidal looks interesting already - although it's only a repackage of an existing service.
I do fear, though, that we are heading down a rocky road. The majority of people go streaming on a subscription service, the services then start to consolidate and, voila, the music industry gets what it wants. No-one actually 'owns' the music anymore. Just streams it for a monthly fee. Which will probably increase year-on-year once the market is down to one or two big players.
I mean, how would a start-up negotiate a price to acquire 25 million tracks?
Hope spelled it right it ...
No there's a hyphen missing, the Naim website has advertising showing it's current name.
I do hope people do not go 'streaming' for the very reasons Jon Myles mentions. Music lovers will be over a barrel...
Market forces WILL work on the streaming business. This is why I'm relatively unconcerned whether my particular music player has built-in support for Brand X Music Streaming Inc. My "bet" is that my player will be relevant longer than Brand X is around (unless Brand X is Apple or Google or Amazon). At which point its support for Brand X will merely be an irrelevant menu item.
PS -- We never "owned" our music. But yes we own(ed) a physical archive of it. Some say we never "owned" our beer either, but I am not one of "them."
And I guess for mu-so and any future offshoots, it probably doesn't really need any subscription services pre-loaded, as it has Bluetooth.
So whatever the owner wants to use, it will just be bluetooth'ed (is that a real word or did I just make it up?!) across from another device.
More of a consideration for the other current streaming products though.
Well Chris, in my experience is that a separate AppleTV / Airplay or Bluetooth device works with these services, but ultimately for a hifi system sound quality and most importantly musical enjoyment takes a huge hit because of the limitations of the interfaces / sources.
I am looking for a combined Naim digital service source device where I can enjoy the music, not just to be able to hear a bland, uninspiring unmusical sound.
Simon
Well Chris, in my experience is that a separate AppleTV / Airplay or Bluetooth device works with these services, but ultimately for a hifi system sound quality and most importantly musical enjoyment takes a huge hit because of the limitations of the interfaces / sources.
I am looking for a combined Naim digital service source device where I can enjoy the music, not just to be able to hear a bland, uninspiring unmusical sound.
Simon
I agree totally Simon.
I was just trying to make the point that for the new to Naim users who will purchase mu-so, the reservations that we have will probably not cross their mind.
Integrated service for the other streaming products is more a consideration for existing owners.
Chris, spot on.. BTW I apologise for my iPad english in my previous post 
I didnt notice poor English in your post Simon, its too early on a Sunday morning!
Hope spelled it right it ...
No there's a hyphen missing, the Naim website has advertising showing it's current name.
I do hope people do not go 'streaming' for the very reasons Jon Myles mentions. Music lovers will be over a barrel...
There may be a missing hyphen, but there's also a superfluous apostrophe.......
Do you mean a Naim branded streaming service?
Bart, no I wasn't, although an interesting proposition.. I was thinking of a Streamer / Nstream type combo where I can select my streaming services as well as my own local media.
Fingers crossed this is what will be heading our way...
Naim need to keep the services interface and APIs easy to develop or even licence to third parties.. There will be a lot of comings and goings in the internet streaming space I suspect..
Isn't it the other way around i.e. the streaming provider e.g. Spotify provides the API which companies like Naim use to integrate into their products?
I don't think Spotify feels much competitive pressure to offer CD quality or better streaming. They will do it only if and when it suits them. You could even argue that the majority of its customers would want better curation and a larger catalog before they wanted CD quality streaming. The problem is that streaming music is not a competitive market, it's the last company to run out of cash wins market.
There are 2 principle issues:
The cost structure of the business actively discourages companies from offering better quality streams.
Streaming companies don't pay royalties based on the number of users they have or what is streamed, they pay a flat fixed percentage (about 70%) of total revenue. That makes it almost impossible to get out from under your costs and actually make money. Spotify and to a lesser extent Deezer have been particularly good at getting mobile networks to subsidise some or all of the cost for the subscriber. The magic number was thought to be 10 million subscribers, but even at that level Spotify is simply reducing its losses and not making a profit.
The second issue is that currently there are not enough people willing to pay. According to Midia Research who study digital music, 34 percent of people who stream music online will not pay for music because they get what they want from YouTube for free.
As I have said previously I find this all rather depressing. I have a 12 month Qobuz Hi-Fi subscription and recently signed up to Beats for 12 months. I'm quite keen on streaming but I am unconvinced that most of these companies will exist in 5 years. The key players in one form or another will be Apple/Beats, Deezer, Spotify, and YouTube Music Key/Google, principally because they have the deepest pockets. Providing there is enough genuinely high res music worth streaming, I hope one of these companies will offer it.
Greg, yes the service providers have their APIs, but I was suggesting, and could have worded it better, that Naim modularise and simplify their approach to connecting to music services so it is relatively straightforward to develop the software on Nstream and perhaps the streamers to connect to these services. It was these middleware APIs perhaps behind the GUIs I was thinking of.
Ultimately if streaming services don't adopt lossless streaming then for the music lover / enthusiast they will remain marginal and for cursory / background use only.. In which case the subscription model will probably decline to that of a free lowfi access funded by advertising, as with Spotify regular access now. This would be a terrible missed opportunity...
However lossless streaming using FLAC/ALAC probably uses approx 3 to 3.5 x the bandwidth of 320kbps lossy streaming and I suspect the streaming delivery is a relatively small cost in the cost of sale. Large scale internet access and streaming servers are getting cheaper all the time and certainly a lot cheaper than say just 2 years ago (at least in the UK) and so I don't think the costs of delivery are the barrier to making this work.
Simon
There's an 'un boxing' video on What Hifi...
There's an 'un boxing' video on What Hifi...
Yeah, good, but I caught the lines "dedicated app"....that doesn't sound promising for a "universal" android app coming anytime soon, yet again!
The 'dedicated app' bit is wrong – the versions of the new app I have seen, both Android and iOS, will control both mu-so and other Naim network music products, both Uniti and ND-.
The 'dedicated app' bit is wrong – the versions of the new app I have seen, both Android and iOS, will control both mu-so and other Naim network music products, both Uniti and ND-.
Guess N stream app for Android will take another ten years.
The 'dedicated app' bit is wrong – the versions of the new app I have seen, both Android and iOS, will control both mu-so and other Naim network music products, both Uniti and ND-.
Guess N stream app for Android will take another ten years.
Not to mention the Windows Phone app (which I would like to have now).
Guess N stream app for Android will take another ten years.
Not if the pre-release one I have currently running on a £99 Asus tablet is anything to go by.
I'm tempted to get a Mu So for our conservatory but I can't quite get my head around how best to get toons from my current system into it. I use Amarra/iTunes on iMac with attached HD via USB into DAC. Now I can use Airplay but then how can I control this? I use the iTunes remote to select music but will this work with Airplay? Guess I could use the 'Screens' app. to control the iMac but that's a bit fiddly.