The future is Streaming?

Gavin, I've moved this thread to the Streaming Audio Room for you.

Gavin - given your current set up an NDX would be a bare minimum.

Most likely an NDS with a 555PS.

I agree with Adam, but it depends on what you want. Like many people here, I have more than one system which I treat quite differently: Naim in the lounge for proper listening and a laptop-based system in my home office (AQ Dragonfly, Grado SR325e) for background sound while I'm working. So if you want to adopt streaming for serious listening then an NDS seems a good match, along with a NAS and/or Tidal. But if you just want some background sound then the AirDAC and Spotify are probably fine. 

I would agree, the NDX looks like the best next step for some serious listening.

Trouble is, I need to replace a 300 with a 500 (since setting up in a smaller room, and listening at lower volume, I can hear the 300/500/500 mismatch more).  I also need to upgrade my Supercap on the SNAXO.  Not to mention SL cables!

The NDX sounds like an option after that as I am limited to 2 fraim stacks, so space  for more power supplies is a bit limited!  Unless I were to give up the 555 

That I think calls for another Fraim level

Agreed, I'm downloading the best quality FLACs I can find.

I'm not sure about DSD though, the ones I have seen seem to have a lower quality (bit rate times 16 or 24) than FLACs.

My thinking is I hold off, use the AirDac and iTunes(my CDs) or Spotify for convenience.  Get the rest of the system properly balanced.  By then, perhaps streaming options may have improved.

iS the future streaming? Yes where that means from some personality local digital storage. And for me an emphatic no re an online subscription service.

various reasons, of which key ones are my own musical taste not being mainstream so not tending to be supported or promoted by subscription providers, plus I go for music with longevity - longevity for me at least- so I want to play again and again: more cost effective to buy, and then I know it is and will always be there, and won't disappear through a change in policy or anything else. Also dropouts when playing music are unbearable - my system at home is optimized to prevent any, but online streaming is always prone to it, though admitedly in another decade's time that may not be the case.

DSD is 1 bit. It's a different recording technique, which must originate at a time when recording is made, rather than through a software conversion. 

I believe online, cloud-based streaming is a huge part of the future. 

The market is moving rapidly away from physical media, so CDs will become uneconomic to produce before long. They will die out. Digital download to local storage or online streaming will be the primary (perhaps only) options available within a few years. The music itself will be identical either way (same suppliers, same servers, same noughts and ones) so choice and quality won't be deciding factors - the choice will be purely economic or personal convenience, eg buy outright, monthly subscription, ad-funded or some hybrid option.

In general, artists and publishers prefer 'buy outright' and service suppliers (eg Spotify, Apple) prefer monthly subscription, so that'll be the tension on the supplier side of the market. My money would certainly be on the service suppliers - nothing in the history of the music industry suggests it is capable of coherent strategy - so subscriptions will dominate. But I'm sure 'buy outright' will continue as an option; there's no reason not to. I'm also sure that niches will be served by niche suppliers.

In the short term I find online streaming frustrating. I will probably continue my Tidal subscription, but with reservations: it needs to get better in terms of reliability and choice. But that's just one supplier and the industry is in its infancy - online streaming will surely be dominant within a few years.

Innocent Bystander posted:

iS the future streaming? Yes where that means from some personality local digital storage. And for me an emphatic no re an online subscription service.

Streaming locally is the past and presently the present in this house. Not the future. As for paying a third party to listen to a non permanent copy of an album at 16/44 or more commonly much lower, I'm not wealthy enough to flush money down the toilet. I'll stick to what I can access on the internet the telly and the radio.

I thought I'd check to see how long MP3 has been around and the answer is 23 years, although the hardware that uses them appeared about twenty years ago. Those of you around at that time would have lived in a world where the Internet did not exist outside of academic institutions and even there was primarily a means of communication i.e. Mail. 

MP3's primary attribute was its minimal usage of the minimal storage that was available on the hardware at that time which carried through to the Internet where transmission speed was, and possibly still is the bottleneck. Either way, Internet speed has risen exponentially while storage costs have dropped and volumes increased equally exponentially.

There is no fundamental technical reason why most of us should not have better than CD quality streamed music. However, the loss of control by the music conglomerates is one major stumbling block as is revenue generation sufficient to make recording worthwhile. To say that streamed music is secondary to CDs or Vinyl is perhaps not quite risible, but may be equated as to why I like the colour blue and you like pink. It is not even comparable to a good or a bad wine.

What happens to the processing of the received music is what gives most pleasure to our ears and that definitely can be equated to good or bad wine otherwise Naim would not exist. Nevertheless, just look at the issues in the streaming section of this bulletin board and you can see that the software related to streaming musical content is not Naim's forte. To believe that Naim streams and stores music better than the much bigger general purpose specialists is not credible; blimey, they have trouble with metadata. 

Stream your music from whomever you like, or have it on a Nas and spend all your money on the bits that feed the decent speakers. After all, a 272 is just a receiver and preamp, albeit a nice one. My bet is that the CES announcement will be a Muso light for reproducing streamed music.

I think you have to bear in mind that even with streaming, there is the concept of ownership of the replay rights and the collector's mindset which may not go away and is clearly not generational. You may find the followng thread from earlier in the year useful:

https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...reaming-subscription

I think streaming is great and it is my only source. But I won't entertain the idea of going solely for cloud based streaming in a million years. Things happen, services go down, ISPs conk out, maybe war breaks out and you end up with your Naim, a power generator and a cabin in the woods hiding out for the dust to settle for a decade. In those situations I want my own offline collection to stream locally.

As shown by the above thread, there seems to be a huge divide between those who beleive in ownership and those who have no interest in it and since it doesn't follow the expected lines of age I can't see that cloud streaming is the future only that it is a big part of the future.

You are right, which is why I mentioned the use of a NAS for storing content if ownership is of primary importance. I, of course, own LPs CDs and stream music. I also have a NAS, but find ripping CDs a pain. There is no ultimate solution. At the Bristol HiFi show last year I heard a system made up of a record deck, specialist valve amps and speakers designed for record reproduction which sounded and looked phenomenal, at a price.

andarkian posted:

What happens to the processing of the received music is what gives most pleasure to our ears and that definitely can be equated to good or bad wine otherwise Naim would not exist. Nevertheless, just look at the issues in the streaming section of this bulletin board and you can see that the software related to streaming musical content is not Naim's forte. To believe that Naim streams and stores music better than the much bigger general purpose specialists is not credible; blimey, they have trouble with metadata. 

 

I think you are confusing two issues here: content and hardware. It is unfair to accuse NAIM (hardrware manufacturer) of having problems with streaming or metadata. If you read the forum carefully, hardly any post relates to problems with NAIM's streamers. Most users seem to have a problem with streaming from NAS using media server software or with Tidal / Spotify.

andarkian posted:

 I also have a NAS, but find ripping CDs a pain. There is no ultimate solution.

I also found ripping CDs a pain, untill I bought a UnitiServe SSD. It did hurt my wallet, but both pains are now gone

@Mike-B, I'm seriously impressed you can find 99% of the music you want available for download. Many of us find 99% of what we want is only on vinyl or CD. I make a point to scour the download sites before each buying spree but only in a blue moon do I find something interesting.

I get virtually all my new music as a download. I imagine it depends on what you want to buy. 

The only painful aspect of ripping music, to me, is the actual process. When I say it is painful, I really mean I can 't be bothered. My CD collection stretches back to whenever CDs came out and the number of remasters etc means that I would be ripping quite a lot of what I consider to be poorly reproduced music. I have little or no problem with either Tidal or Spotify, although Tidal will be ending this month when the free trial runs out.

I think the whole streaming space is evolving at a tremendous rate and am quite happy with what a lot of people would consider second rate reproduction as the process is mature enough to deliver much more than we are currently being allowed and, just as The Beatles had to cave in to streaming, we will also gradually get higher higher density streaming delivered slickly.

feeling_zen posted:

@Mike-B, I'm seriously impressed you can find 99% of the music you want available for download. Many of us find 99% of what we want is only on vinyl or CD. I make a point to scour the download sites before each buying spree but only in a blue moon do I find something interesting.

Whether what anyone wants is available for download or online streaming clearly depends on their taste in music - but it does seem, albeit unsurprisingly, that online streaming sources, and to a certain extent online download sources, are geared very much towards mainstream popular music.

Following this through, I would venture that for mainstream music listeners, especially those primarily interested only in the music of the day, online streaming is indeed the future. For the rest of us offline streaming of purchased music is probably the future, whether downloaded or ripped. That is apart from die-hard vinyl aficionados, though even for them only until such time as their records reach unacceptable levels of deterioration and aren't available for re-purchase, or when they want music that has been digitally recorded in the first place, negating any advantage analogue offered.

As for metadata, I think that's a universal problem, regardless of whether you rip CDs or download music, and nothing to do with Naim: Quite apart from missing metadata, if you take something pretty fundamental for sorting as an example, namely genre:  what someone may describe as pop another might call rock, and with classical it is even worse, as the same piece of music perhaps recorded by different orchestras or released by different labels the genre might be assigned orchestral, symphonic, concerto, romantic, or simply classical. And reassigning metadata as you want it is an annoying time-consuming process.

When I ripped all my CDs I decided on about 15 genres, and force all my new purchases into that. Once an album is downloaded to the laptop, I fix the genre, which takes about ten seconds, and make sure everything else is ok before copying the album to my Synology. This little bit of organisation at the beginning avoids potential problems later. 

For classical I have:

Chamber music

Vocal -classical

Opera

Classical - for non vocal stuff that is bigger than chamber music. 

I have a lot of ECM albums, which often span genres, so have two genres called ECM and ECM New Series for these. 

Then there is Ambient / Electronica, Folk, World, Jazz, Vocal - Jazz, Reggae, Country, Soundtrack. Everything else is lumped into Pop- Rock. 

All my 2,500 or so albums fit into this simple scheme, and if I can't find anything I just go to the all albums view and use search.