Unity Serve dead, age 1.
Posted by: andrew0810 on 12 April 2015
Last week my US broke down. 12 months old. Not quite what I was expecting, regarding the price tag...
Never mind, it's at the dealer already, and fortunatelity I made a backup recently...
But one thought came to my mind, after reading a lot of comments here: does Naim already have too many irons in the fire, so that quality control starts to suffer? They throw new gear on the market in rather high frequency, like hardly affordable flagship amps, speakers and cables (cables! Naim didn't care about cable-hysteria for years - but today they are in the Nordost-league...), car hifi, streamers, multi-function-products, all kind of lower-price stuff and obviously they have someone troubles with their software-development. Is Naim still on the right track? We can read a lot about Hugo and Sonos here. For some good reason? Where are you going to Naim?
I didn't know that Dell and HP made amplifiers.
Hewlett Packard did. That would be the Barney Oliver (below). Dell does, but it's for graphics.
And by the way the Windows dtc is one of the all time best userinterfaces!
Yes, totally agree, a lot of functionality available.
Yes it's good, until you try n-Serve for Mac, which combines DTC, nServe and a web browser...
Hh, not great advice why get rid of a great sounding sever and also downgrade the files to flac, seems musical performance is not top of your list.
anything with moving bits is at risk, cassette, t/tables, cartridges, cars, cd mechs, and certainly hard drives, we all know that.
Our QC continues to improve with lower and lower% failures yes sometimes we screw up but often it's parts which are out of our control but necessary to make the unit work
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servers sales are going just brilliantly , why because they work, they do a great job and we love our music and wish to get the best performance we can, will it be replaced of course one day, can we and will we support it yes of course we will but for sure it's more of an issue than an psu, but we have supported CD players for years.
Have we spread our selves to thin too,many new products, we are in the entertainment business, people like new things, our engineers love working on new things and judging by our Growth many customers enjoy our offerings.
Should I say to the team nah don't try to make the worlds best amp we are spreading ourselves too thin don't think so, what about mu-so stuffed with tech and the most musical all in one unit on the planet. 272, cables all legitmate products all on song!
it is an interesting thread, I am sorry your serve broke, I am sure we will fix it,
I giggled for a bit when I saw this - to surmise that Apple is resting on its laurels is a bit of a stretch.
Let me give you an example of a company that may have to get a little worried about this whole streaming music issue: the mighty Apple. The offerings of Spotify, Deezer, Qubuz etc. are more than nibbling Apple's core (pun intended) iTunes download business model. Many of us have iTunes but can get so much more for our tenner a month from these other offerings. The deals done by the streamers, for want of a better word, with the record companies are in place and Apple with its own new streaming offering due out any time soon is not going to be able to Lord it over the record companies twice. Apple probably will not have the market place anything like to itself. Similarly its Apple TV programmes and films is struggling to keep up with Netflix, Sky etc. In the streaming world Apple may have to fall back to its base businesses of Macs and phones, and as for the watch...
Streaming per se should hold no real concerns for Naim as long as it focuses on translation and reproduction, for which it is renowned.
Apple's team are currently re-tooling Beats Music to provide a much more artist-focused experience and the effort is being led by none other than Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame, who has invested time in both immersive artistic experiences on the Web and has released most of his own material in high-res for quite some time (and cares how it sounds). There exists a large library of 96 kHz / 24-bit submissions already in the vaults, so to speak. (I happen to know a little bit about the vaults .)
I love TIDAL (I drive nowhere without it, and always play from it as HI-FI uncompressed), but I also suspect that Beats (if they do it right by embedded device manufacturers, so to speak) will easily provide some competition out of the gate. The iOS / OS X audio subsystem is much better suited for this than it was fourteen years ago.
Qobuz, for me, doesn't register; from a developer's perspective, the API and constraints on the user experience are crap, and they've largely ignored the North American market (which makes them about zero relevant, given the number of manufacturers and consumers here). I understand their appeal, especially regarding the coverage of their catalogue, but surmise that their model is truly to be purchased by a larger entity, say, Samsung, in order to compete and survive.
I giggled for a bit when I saw this - to surmise that Apple is resting on its laurels is a bit of a stretch.
Apple's team are currently re-tooling Beats Music to provide a much more artist-focused experience and the effort is being led by none other than Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame, who has invested time in both immersive artistic experiences on the Web and has released most of his own material in high-res for quite some time (and cares how it sounds). There exists a large library of 96 kHz / 24-bit submissions already in the vaults, so to speak. (I happen to know a little bit about the vaults .)
I love TIDAL (I drive nowhere without it, and always play from it as HI-FI uncompressed), but I also suspect that Beats (if they do it right by embedded device manufacturers, so to speak) will easily provide some competition out of the gate. The iOS / OS X audio subsystem is much better suited for this than it was fourteen years ago.
Qobuz, for me, doesn't register; from a developer's perspective, the API and constraints on the user experience are crap, and they've largely ignored the North American market (which makes them about zero relevant, given the number of manufacturers and consumers here). I understand their appeal, especially regarding the coverage of their catalogue, but surmise that their model is truly to be purchased by a larger entity, say, Samsung, in order to compete and survive.
Actually I was going to refer to Beats given the astonishing amount of money that Apple paid for the company. It may have its finger on a pulse in the music world but is hardly representational of the whole music scene. The wider music industry will not be falling at Apple's feet, at least at the outset, when it introduces its new streaming service. I think the term once bitten comes to mind. What I was really trying to say is that Apple are susceptible to competition from the start as far as a streaming service is concerned. The innovative aspects of iTunes and Apple TV have been largely superseded and are very vulnerable to attack from the plethora of offerings elsewhere.
Personally, I just think as far as streaming music is concerned, Naim are in a good position to build on their strengths while Apple could be extremely vulnerable even with Beats and a mountain of cash. Just so you know I am not anti Apple, I am writing this on a MacBook, have an iPhone, Apple TV and iTunes. As for the iWatch, my Citizen Eco Drive requires no battery, is perfect to the second, and adjusts automatically for month and season. My Zenith El Primero does for flash occasions and I would not be selling Rolex stocks if I had any.