TIDAL Music streaming service

Your post points up the contradictions.  Qobuz is the future, but Qobuz is dying.  That's one "hugely popular music streaming service" that seems on the wrong side of the popularity curve.

It seems, to me, that the hi quality streaming industry has some settling in, or out, to do yet. 

Bart, yes I thought the same about Qobuz when I was writing the message. I heard that they have 20,000 subscribers which isn't many. Spotify was more what I had in mind. I don't know how many subscribers WiMP(TIDAL) have but I understand that they have strong financial backing.  I also understand that none of the music steaming services including Spotify are currently making a profit.  

Other manufacturers including Sonos think it's worth supporting music steaming services and they wouldn't do that if they didn't believe it would help them to make money... Also the Naim customer base would obviously be an ideal target market for the streaming services if Naim supported them.

They are partnering with Meridian which I own, but I won't be paying £19.99 for the privilege. I would have been interested at a more sensible price. Yes, they have to make a profit, but seeing as the USA pays the same in dollars, then I consider the cost here too high.

The fact that Qobuz have struck up a partnership with Sonos should give them good access to a lot of potential customers, and in what appears to be a growing marketplace.  Whether Sonos customers really appreciate, or value, the benefits of the higher quality streaming is another matter.  Therefore, partnerships and publicity through brands like Naim are probably a better route to what should be their target audience.  £20 a month for either service is quite a lot, but I have a CD collection that's in the hundreds, and Qobuz instantly takes that to about a million, and with no detectable compromise in sound quality.  And that I have really benefited from.  I really hope they make it through the rough times.

at least the sonos app always works as does the sonos which is stable and easy to set up and a connect only costs =£270. 

I'd love a naim streamer but won't do so till it does have spotify and stable app and software.

Jobseeker - did you just out yourself?

Are you Bob Stuart or Allen Boothroyd?

Originally posted by nudgerwilliams:

Jobseeker - did you just out yourself?

Are you Bob Stuart or Allen Boothroyd?

Hi Jobseeker. If you really are Allen Boothroyd, how about a new amplifier based on the Lecson AC1/AP3 casework.

I for one would buy one of these almost irrespective of the sound quality. The most beautiful amplifier ever!

WiMP has kept me going when my server died, works without problems in flac uncompressed. I can live with using my squeezebox receiver into Ndac, but it would be much better if WiMP could be supported on the servers.

Unless all the streaming services with uncompressed music dies because of financial problems, Naim will have to find a way to incorporate them in the streamers and servers.

However I can live without mp3 servides like spotify.

Qobuz also recently announced a tie-up with Samsung which could help, though, again I'm not sure that many Samsung users will sign up to the HiFi quality service.

Sorry, but for all Naim stands for, to opt for Spotify and not Tidal contradicts its ethos altogether. Is it a commercial decision to cater for the masses and leave the loyals lagging behind? Where will the Naim sound be in another 5 years?

The Qobuz situation's quite an odd one. 

I keep hearing it mentioned here and on other 'audiophile forums' (for want of a better phrase), that people want it integrated into their devices, but are also worried about it failing.  Oh, and that it's too expensive. 

I really don't get it. 

It's the first company ever to offer unlimited (in terms of their library) cd quality streaming, and you can also buy cd and hd quality downloads with no drm at a reasonable price as an added convenience.  Once you get past a few quirks it's actually a pretty good setup For such a young company. 

It's what hifi lovers have been waiting for.  Yet few are seemingly signing up. 

I'm not rich and have an entryish level system in Naim terms, but for the service provided £20 seems reasonable to me. It's a bit more than I paid for a couple of DVD rentals on love film before I abandoned that, and less than my cable tv package full of dross.

It's custom designed for people with high end gear who love decent quality sound and hate mp3 (like me), and so I really felt like I had to sign up just to support it.

Now I've been using it for a while I'm really glad I signed up, and I hope it survives and gets integrated into all high end gear.  

Naim being slow to adopt was definitely a big part of my decision not to add another lovely black box to my system. Obviously everything takes development time, but once you make streamers and have control apps for iPads it's surely not rocket science to tie into another API of a streaming service. I've no doubt a tie up would help both companies long term. 

Allen

i agree that how Naim handles the web streaming is crucial to long term loyalty with the brand. My 11 month old Superuniti looks like it can be updated to use Spotify , but not be Bluetooth enabled, like the latest models. To me the SU was a considerable investment and it will be sad if it will be

 obsolete in a year or two. I certainly hope it will be able to use a Quobuz type service in future.

I agree with the recent sentiment of this thread.. Spotify was a useful development excercoise for the more mass market appeal that hopefully for Naim aligns with the Muso.. But for the higher capability  products in the Naim range Spotify doesn't really cut it (I am a Spotify Premium subscriber)... Therefore I will be expecting to see services such as Qobuz appear shortly if Naim is serious about public network streaming. These services are of the web application era, they  have clear and published APIs. They are designed to be integrated to... Naim will need to demonstrate this with its streamer products if they are not be be predominately limited to CD / Hidef transport duties.

My fear is that the current Naim streamer architecture is not entirely suitable for integration to the new lossless web services (I am not talking lossy Spotify here) I hope I am proved wrong. Qobuz and Spotify clients seem to download the streaming media slightly ahead of time, spooling into a buffer, thereby eliminating vagaries of Internet bandwidth throughput from the audio quality.. But that requires client memory to spool into, and I am not sure how much memory the Naim network streamers have... perhaps another reason why the focus on Spotify (smaller spooling required)

Simon

A big +1 - I have recently started a trial of Spotify Premium. Whilst the interface and add ons are better than QOBUZ the sound quality just isn't good enough to stop me needing to obtain the music at lossless quality and so for me Spotify is only fit for checking stuff out or background listening.

QOBUZ is a true paradigm shift and as long as that or any other lossless streaming service keeps going I will never again buy new music to "own"  - long live QOBUZ, cheap at twice the price!

but it won't be obselete, it just won't have a bluetooth connection whcih is hardly a loss anyway. It will still be super capable at what you bought it to do

Some stuff on Spotify can sound rather good - I was listening to Leonard Cohen live in Dublin the other evening and it was perfectly fine, whereas some things, such as Lorde's album have that upper bass mush thing going on. I guess that's the recording rather than Spotify per se. The R3 Hidef iRadio always sounds very good to me, and that's  320k as well.

The sound is not as good as CD quality, obviously, but it's great for background, for finding new music, and for and for those 'I wish I had that' moments. I'm playing a morning jazz playlist at the moment and there is some great music there. You can also save music to the iPhone to play in the car via bluetooth, without needing to convert flac to mp3 and load it into iTunes, so it doesn't bung up the laptop.

I can see a mixed economy of streamed and owned music going forward. Hopefully by avoiding those CD mistakes, it will actually save money. 

HH, BBC R3 uses AAC and Spotify Premium uses Ogg Vorbis. These are different lossy compression codecs which do perform slightly differently for a given bandwidth with winners and losers in both camps.. After all they are relatively significant sonic compromises.

i agree the R3 AAC 320kbps stream can sound quite agreeable, but thus far Spotify Premium on my Naim sounds annoyingly congested on many tracks (unless very low level background music ie Christmas Carols!).. Perhaps I have just got spoilt with lossless audio. Fine for the IPad inbuilt speakers and the car however, and that's where I use Spotfiy now .. and absolutely no complaints there.

Simon

My sinuses are currently annoyingly congested, so maybe that's why Spotify is sounding ok for casual listening. I can imagine that on my more modest system, the compromises are less obvious that on a more highfalutin setup.

Possibly

They might have almost done that. I'd seen a couple of reports that the streaming quality was very high sometimes as much as CD quality which certainly chimed with my experiences. I left it running for a full 24 hours and never got less than about 900k. I tested it on a 250 Mbit/s connection.

As a Naim Dealer, and the owner of the largest Classical and Jazz CD store in Alberta Canada (ain't maybe sayin' much ), if Tidal and/or Qobuz was available on our Naim streamer/servers, I would not blame clients for never purchasing another CD. We have been using Tidal on our Bluesound products this past week and though not a fast as a locally stored CD on our network, it's pretty good. We are using it to allow clients the chance to audition hifi gear with music they are familiar with, without resorting to using their telephones with poor mp3 files as a source in the sound room. I would love to hand these people an inexpensive Android pad with the Naim Streamer app on it, and knock 'em out with what Naim and Tidal could do for their music listening habits. I have not yet checked to see if obscure classical recordings are on TIdal - hopefully in the coming weeks I will have a chance to play more with it and if they deliver discontinued classical and jazz recordings. Best of the Christmas season to all.

Hi AV -

Does Bluesound make a product with S/PDIF output? Am currently using an old iPhone running Tidal into my NDS's front USB port.

Thanks!

Hook

Firstly, @dayjay, the definition of 'obsolete' is that something is replaced with something new and better. Of course the SU will continue to do what it was bought to do, but it will still be obsolete if a newer version has improved functionality (eg Bluetooth).

Secondly, there's a limit to how upgradeable something can be in life. So far, Naim has maintained a single code base for all its streaming products, but clearly that can't be an eternal position. Sooner or later, all our digital kit will be obsolete. And then we can carry on with it doing what we bought it for, which is fine for me as @Dayjay says, or we can buy the next thing. 

late 16th century: from Latin obsoletus 'grown old, worn out', past participle of obsolescere 'fall into disuse'.  I beg to differ, not that it matters especially,  my uq2 is not obselete it has just been superceded by a model with more fuctionality. When I bought my qute I wasn't looking for a device with bluetooth, I was looking for a device that does what my qute does, and will continue to do presumably for some time. When Ford upgrade one of their cars existing owners don't expect them to retrofit earlier models, not sure why we would expect Naim to be any different.  The device they sold me does what they said it would at the time I bought it, if I need a device that does something different,  perhaps something newer Naim devices offer, I'll go and buy one that fits my need until then I'll use my perectly fuctional, far from worn out and unused Qute