Qb in da house

How well does the Qb work close to the wall - i had a read of a review which mentioned the sound settings could be changed for close to wall placement so i wondered how well it works like this ?

James

Apologies if these aspects have already been commented upon, but what's it like for the spoken voice, ie BBC Radio Four (not the boosted local radio and pop stations) and BBC Radio Three, ie for classical music. Is the sound base heavy?  Thanks.

james n posted:

How well does the Qb work close to the wall - i had a read of a review which mentioned the sound settings could be changed for close to wall placement so i wondered how well it works like this ?

James

 

If you look at my photo above, you will notice that it is placed between two wall cupboards. It's also about 15cm from the rear wall. I have the settings as per Naim's recommendations and I've found that it works very well. 

The work surface that it's sat on is a very hard, dense granite-like material and may be assisting in the reduction of any potential bass boom of course.

When I get a wifi extender, wich seem to be necessary even though the Muso is about 15 meters from my router, I will place mine very close to a wall. This results in moomy bass but it helps to disable loudness and set the room position to close to wall. 

Claus

Bought it as a gift for the bride and placed it in the kitchen today.  I have accrued lots of brownie points for this .. it sounds superb.  Set up was a snap.  Radio signal is strong, we've been listening to it while preparing dinner .. no drop outs, no hesitations .. Bluetooth'ing Pandora; UpNp from the Unitiserve downstairs, iRadio all good.  I was surprised how heavy it is .. really substantial.  Well done NAIM.

John Willmott posted:

Bought it as a gift for the bride and placed it in the kitchen today.  I have accrued lots of brownie points for this .. it sounds superb.  Set up was a snap.  Radio signal is strong, we've been listening to it while preparing dinner .. no drop outs, no hesitations .. Bluetooth'ing Pandora; UpNp from the Unitiserve downstairs, iRadio all good.  I was surprised how heavy it is .. really substantial.  Well done NAIM.

Very pleased you are not having any problems with wi-fi, so far at least. Does this include when the microwave oven is in use in your kitchen? If not, can you please describe the layout relative to your base station?

Regards to the bride and happy listening.

"can you please describe the layout relative to your base station?"

I'm going to assume that by "base station" you mean the wireless router.

The communications closet (Wireless router, switch, Unitiserve, NAS etc) is on the bottom floor of the house facing east.  The kitchen is on the next floor up (3 story house) abutting the west wall.  Lateral distance around 12 meters with an elevation of 4 meters.  Wireless router is a Netgear R6220.

One thing to remember .. here in Florida internal walls of newer houses are wood framed and faced with sheet rock (plaster board) providing very little impediment to W-Fi signals.

The microwave is on the other side of the kitchen from the QB .. 2.5 meters direct line of sight.  During operation of the microwave the QB did not miss a beat (sorry for that .. couldn't resist).

John.

John

During operation of the microwave the QB did not miss a beat (sorry for that .. couldn't resist).

Perhaps the microwaves work differently in the US too. Ok 120v instead of 230v or so but still the same power range. Smaller kitchen here, but have just had to resort to using a Powerline (dLAN adapter, not what Naim call a Powerline) to avoid interference in what is an excellent wi-fi strength area.

Many thanks for the response

Another happy Muso Qb (purchased this afternoon) owner here, and as a bonus I feel less of a fraud posting on this forum now that I actually own 2 pieces of Naim gear.

Really easy to set up and performing flawlessly with uPnP, iradio and Tidal using Wi-Fi at the moment. Just one little hiccup when I found to my dismay that Tidal did not appear as an option in my Muso version of the Naim app. This would have been bad news as I have just unsubscribed from Spotify in favour of the better sounding Tidal. Took me a while, but I eventually found tidal hiding away on a second 'inputs' page on the Naim app.

Now Tidal is also performing flawlessly (for the time being anyway) over Wi-Fi in my kitchen. I am pretty sure that hi-res uPnP will be a little dodgy with my current Wi-Fi only setup, but I can live with that. Experimenting with hi-res is for tomorrow, as is setting up 'multiroom' with my Qb and Naim streamer. 

A lot of money to spend on yet another 'toy', since I did have a very serviceable DAB radio in my kitchen, but there is no doubt that the Qb is a very desirable and beautifully designed bit of kit, and my guilt pangs have more or less disappeared already.   

A trip to the local supermarket planned for tomorrow to purchase the obligatory vine ripened tomatoes to sit on top of the Qb, and provide that final little bit of ambience.

Marvellous, another happy owner! I rather like the Qb and food shots. We are going to redo the kitchen in the summer, so it's nice to get some ideas. 

Got mine monday - first naim kit that wife likes. Stunning and easy to setup. Only prop is wifi stability, so guess need to setup a dedicated network for it. Fantastic product.

how does one use multiroom, its active on nds and qb, but dont know how to get nds music on qb

thx Lars

Press the little squares at the bottom right of the 'now playing' screen.

HH posted:

"Press the little squares at the bottom right of the 'now playing' screen"

Doesn't work for me, although my Wi-Fi setup must be better than I thought. I've been playing hi-res files via Wi-Fi on my Muso Qb most of the evening without so much a stutter. I'm extremely happy with the Qb There's something quite liberating and quite 'cool' about listening to music on a simple little device like this rather than on a 'big hi-fi' system.

Mind you, I have just switched briefly to my main system for a reality check, and of course the sound quality difference is amazing. It doesn't lessen the value of the Qb though. I'm still very happy to listen to the lovely little box for extended periods of time.  

Actually, it does work for me. I had initially tried to set up multiroom using a high res (24 bit, 192 KHz) track, and simply got a 'player not responding' message whichever way round I tried.

Just switched to a standard res (CD quality) file, and the '4 little squares' setup worked first time.

Thanks will try that! Br Lars

I've been critical of Naim's decision to cripple the Qb with an ancient 802.11 b/g radio but since it was announced at CES I've been otherwise excited about the baby Naim. Well, I got to listen to one at the weekend, and now we have one at home so another delighted owner here.

I have configured a wireless-g only network for it using an old router so that it doesn't drag down performance for the rest of the wireless network and it's performing flawlessly. What surprised me is that it will stream my 24/192 downloads without any dropouts even when these are transcoded to WAV by MinimServer... It's also fun seeing the Qb appear in the app alongside our existing NDS and Qute and using multi-room across all three devices has been a blast.

We have it in the bedroom at the moment as a (rather luxurious) radio, alarm clock and streaming system, but we can move it to the kitchen when required or even use it outside when the weather gets better (at low volume levels, obviously).

I really think it's a brilliant concept and I'm sure that Qb will enable Naim to discover a whole new audience. 

Well done and thanks, Naim. (Just fix the wireless support in v2!)

Adrian if you are getting 24/192 on 802.11g you are lucky ... 802.11g has effective maximum average throughput of 22Mbps in ideal conditions (sync speed 54Mbps) .. once you signal subsides slightly or another item shares the channel or SSID you will likely find it starts to stutter. 192/24/2 PCM is approx 10Mbps

Simon

Agreed, Simon. I did the sums and was very surprised to find it can sustain 10Mbps over a wireless-g network. It has the network to itself but the channel has other nearby networks on it so it will be interesting to see if they create any interference.

I'm going to stay with this wireless approach because I value the portability of the Qb. I've tried powerline adapters previously with my Qute but found that they interfered with my wireless mouse and I could hear them clicking through the powered speakers in my study. If they could do that, who knows what they were doing to music on the NDS. Never again.

There has been mention of downsampling when streaming hires files over 48kHz to the Qb but I don't see how that can happen as it would have to be done at the UPnP server. As far as I know the server doesn't do any data rate negotiation with the client and any associated downsampling, so I'm assuming the Qb is getting the full fat files.

We had friends down at the weekend, and their son was glued to his laptop using the wifi, and the Qb in the kitchen couldn't cope with Internet radio or streaming cd quality files via wifi. We now have a cable running to it from the switch and it's playing everything, even 192k files, happily. It's a shame I need the wire, but such is life. It's playing a 192k album at the moment, and really does sound extraordinarily good. 

Installed mine yesterday - all working fine. Today - wifi sis slow as to be unusable and intermittent total broadband drop outs. 

Our broadband is normally very reliable but for the time being I'll assume coincidence... Or can anyone advise/report experience otherwise?

I didn't find it damage my overall broadband but the Qb was constantly stuttering. To solve this I had to get a pretty expensive Wi-Fi extender as Ethernet wasn't an option.

Sam

Interesting.  I'm finding - even having now switched to Ethernet - that broadband drops out frequently, curging both the Qb and anything else. It also takes a fair amount of resetting to come back. 

Could be a coincidence still...especially as using Ethernet (?) but the 'send that bloody box and get a Bluetooth one & a DAB' clamour is growing. 

You could try naim support always helpful in my experience?

Yes - talking to them. I've unplugged the Muso and the Broadband has still dropped out at least once so it may have been a complete coincidence.  

Naim tell me (and I entirely agree!) that there's nothing in the QB that could cause this - but the broadband provider say there's nothing wrong their end.  Frustrating! 

As a former engineer for BT there is plenty that can cause Broadband drop outs even if the line tests OK. The tough bit is getting your service provider to agree.