Naim Unitiqute 2 network issues

I had previously turned off all inputs except those that I thought I might use. I kept Bluetooth on. Now with it off I've enjoyed a full uninterrupted album. A rarity indeed. Oddly with Bluetooth off the signal strength and quality are at worse levels in the factory settings. It must have been having some impact. I've also pointed the Bluetooth antenna away from the wifi one. 

I am correct that the wifi antenna is the longer one? 

Yes, the longer one is WiFi. When I changed to wired, I unscrewed it and smashed it to bits with a hammer for a bit of light relief. (just joking, I put it in the box in case I decided to sell!) If the BT one will unscrew too, I would just remove it.

I suspect you router is a decade old. G routers cannot even be given away. As you have a £1000 hifi device that relies on wifi, why not treat yourself to a new router instead of investigating all these other options which I can assure you will cost the same anyhow?

garyi posted:

I suspect you router is a decade old. G routers cannot even be given away. As you have a £1000 hifi device that relies on wifi, why not treat yourself to a new router instead of investigating all these other options which I can assure you will cost the same anyhow?

 

That's a good point, although ISPs were sending out g routers a great deal less than 10 years ago. I always turn off the WiFi on them and use something better, at the moment I'm using an Airport Extreme which seems to work well.

Well the Bluetooth thing didn't work  

In fact not long after posting I suffered some of the worst performance yet. Had a series of 5 or 6 connection loses one after the other. 

I don't think the unit is faulty, it can work. I will figure this out. My fear of investing in a new router is not the expense, but that it won't work. That would really send me over the edge. I just know I'll see that no network screen again!!!

I also notice people saying with better routers and airport expresses that it works "well". Is that saying not perfect?

After the series of dropouts I hooked the chromecast back up. It worked perfectly. How can this small 2 inch device hold a wifi signal better than the military grade looking unitiqute!?!?!

Hi all, a couple of final questions please? I really appreciate all the advice so far thanks!

For those using an airport express do I simply set this up near my unitiqute, and connect the express wirelessly to my existing wifi router? Apple products seem to flawlessly hold connection to my router.

I then have the option to connect an Ethernet cable and optical cable to the unitiqute?  Or I can see if the unitiqute to express wireless connection is good enough.

Would a newer spec router be a better option overall instead or is the addition of an airport express essentially the same thing? Will the express give me 2.4 and 5 dual band using my g 2.4 router.

Thanks.

Actually I can see straightaway I'm confusing an express with an extreme.

So the express is just a wifi extender and will only boost what I have. The extreme will replace my router if I wish. The extreme is probably the better option so. I assume it's range and signal quality will far exceed what I have. Then again there are probably just as good options from other brands for less.

My approach was to keep the cheap router supplied by my ISP, because it has all sorts of settings I don't understand that were pre-configured by my ISP. I just turn off its WiFi, and connect a decent wireless base station to it with a short Ethernet cable. I use an Airport Extreme, which is a dual band, ac device, but there will be non-Apple devices that would no doubt work well, and cost less. Getting this sorted has made my entire network more stable, not just for audio, so I think it's a worthwhile investment.

If you connect an Airport Express to your streamer, it is much more likely to work reliably if it connects to an Apple device, rather than direct to a router. It also makes life easier if you change your ISP, as the router they supply can be changed without the need to reconfigure your network.

You need to connect an Airport Express to the streamer with an Ethernet cable, either directly, or via a switch. The advantage of a switch is that it will have spare ports for other devices. In particular, if you connect your NAS to it, you are no longer dependent on WiFi for streaming from the NAS - you'll only be using WiFi for web streaming (Tidal, Spotify, iRadio.) You don't need the optical cable for this, but if you do add one, it gives you the option to use Airplay so that you can stream stuff from an iPhone, iPad, or a Mac. 

Perfect, thank you very much.

As ChrisSU says, get the Express, put it near your UQ, have it join your existing wifi network (coming from your existing router) and connect your UQ using an Ethernet cable.

To be pedantic, in this mode your Express is operating as a wireless bridge - imagine a long wire going all the way back to your router instead of the wireless connection from the Express  and you can see the topology is the same. A wireless extender / repeater / booster would be placed half way between your router and another device such as your UQ - sort of a wifi amplifier, with wifi coming if from the router and then going on to the UQ. In this mode, although the signal would be stronger, the speed would get cut in half (doesn't really matter why, but imagine all these things are people and the guy in the middle can listen or talk to relay the conversation, but can't do both listening and talking at the same time).

In your case, the wifi connection on the UQ is the bit you're trying to avoid using, so a stronger but slower wifi signal offers no relief. The first (wifi bridge + short Ethernet cable) solution works and eliminates the UQ wifi capability from the equation. Job done. (And you don't need the optical cable unless you want to add AirPlay functionality; it is not needed for streaming from your NAS or Spotify or Tidal or internet radio.)

best wishes, you're nearly there...

Regards alan

As a wirelss bridge it will be running at half the throughput speed of G connection, thats madness.

grow a pair and buy a decent router from this century. Thats not by apple by the way.

I wouldn't have thought buying a wifi router was a measure of masculinity.

I b

I bet if Apple made the unitiqute it would work just fine

Well that depends of if your are scared it won't work

Seriously the technology has moved on massively as it does. A new router on N or AC will allow more modern devices to scream along and it opens up wifi headroom to allow your older devices to breath. Furthermore it will likely have more memory and a faster processor to enable it to handle load better.

I don't actually use an off the shelf router any more I built my own with two wifi access points connected to it, there are so many options out there nower days.

I know, I was considering an upgrade prior to the Unitiqute anyway.

I wish I could understand why old tech has been used in the qute. Implementing something decent couldn't have driven the price that much higher. Wifi streaming shouldn't be its weak point, it's meant to be it's thing.

Newguy posted:

I bet if Apple made the unitiqute it would work just fine

Yeah, but 6 months later the Apple Unitiqute 7x would come out, the next measure of masculinity, smugability, or whatever.

Being an Apple product though, it would probably play the hell out of MP3s.

joerand posted:

Newguy posted:

I bet if Apple made the unitiqute it would work just fine

Yeah, but 6 months later the Apple Unitiqute 7x would come out, the next measure of masculinity, smugability, or whatever.

To be fair to Apple, they typically release a revised version of a product (at least iPad/iPhone) each year, the price of which is the same as the product it replaces.  Unlike Naim who keep the same product and routinely increase the price year on year!

I'm not in total agreement with garyi : if you use the wifi bridge for a wired client (ie plug your UQ into it), you get all the speed of the wifi connection. It is only when the bridge repeats the signal to wireless clients that you lose half the speed. 

The UQ supports wireless G and N protocols (with N being both newer and faster than G), so improving your wifi from G to N could help overall wifi speed and robustness in your home. IF you choose to try that  one easy way is to buy a somewhat modern router, wire it into your existing home router (do your best to place it as close as convenient to your main location or in the middle of your home), then configure the new router in what is called Access Point mode  - as it sounds this gives you a new wifi connection for any and all your wireless devices, but the physical hardware no longer really functions as a router or DNS server (and it certainly isn't acting as your modem to the outside world of the Internet). You can spend what you like here, but the latest AC routers (newer and faster protocol than N, which is newer than G) will only give advantages to AC clients (like the new iPad). Most big name routers can be configured in this mode with essentially zero knowledge: the web interface offers a radio button selection to choose between router, wireless repeater, and wireless access point. Asus, LinkSys, Netgear, and TPLink all have products that you can read about.

All that said, however, if the goal is to remove the UQ wifi from the equation, you will also need a device - like the Airport Express or anything else that can be configured as a wireless bridge - located close to and connected by a wire to your UQ. IE you can try Thais first and upgrade your home network second without risk or huge wasted expense.

Regards alan

ps - Naim chose Wireless G/N because the 2.4 GHz carrier frequency does a better job going through walls and floors than the 5 GHz band added in for AC, and. They position this as a "second choice" for performance as a hifi as compared to wifi -- so in their product mind, the wifi is not its main thing. Their customers, however, often see it differently. 

pps - as someone already mentioned, if you really have a router offering only G, it probably is time for an upgrade...but t hat is a separate decision for you in my view. 

Solved solved solved!!!!!! Yesssssssss

First clue came this morning. The chromecast audio dongle I had been using as a temporary solution started acting up. It was feeding a lot of noise and distortion into the front analogue input even though it had previously been fine. Connection remained stable but there was definitely interference. This got me suspicious about some interference in the house. 

House was quite, no other devices in active use. I walked around and then I heard it. El cheapo USB charger plug in the kitchen had finished charging a phone and was emitting a high pitched whine as it does when a charge is complete. Turned it off and chromecast was silent again. Fired up Spotify connect on the unitiqute and have enjoyed hours of uninterrupted connection. It seems the unitiqute was particularly affected by this distortion, probably due to its antenna. It would explain the random nature of my problem because the whine only occurred when the often used charger had completed a charge.

usb charger now resides in the recycling bin!!

Thanks to everyone for your help. 

That was a load of nonsense anyway!! Back to having issues again. Strange thing is when I removed the charger everything worked fine. Yesterday evening it all went to pot again. There is something truly wierd going on with my Unitiqute 2. Yesterday not only did it start losing connection frequently but then refused to re connect. Inputs started freezing in the "waiting to initialise" screen again. Time to try an airport express methinks. I read somewhere that two units can be wired into one electrical plug. Can this be done with the Unitiqute and nap 100? Otherwise to locate the express near the Unitiqute I'm going to have to use a strip board which I don't want to do as there's only 2 sockets in that location.

@Newguy ... I know you don't want to do this ... but you really should get a long network cable ... run that through your house as a temporary measure to connect your Unitiqute back to your modem/router.  Get that working first. Then you can work on getting WiFi working.

Can I ask you ... what else do you have in your house?  iPads, laptops, other networked devices?

Connected to the network I have an iPod, iPhone, iPad Air 2, a laptop and the unitiqute 2. Mostly though only the phone and iPad are connected when listening to the unitiqute. I have tried only having one device connected to control the unitiqute but this has also failed.

I'm going to use the chromecast via USB front port for power and optical input to use the unitiqutes dac as an acceptable workaround for now. 

Yes, you can wire the Qute and the 100 into a single plug. How far is the Qute from your router: I'd suggest you follow Eloise's suggestion of running a wire. This will at least enable you to check that the Qute is ok, and that it's a wireless network issue giving problems. 

I temporarily connected the unitiqute directly and it was fine. The router is upstairs, my system downstairs. What kills me is I could have had the router installed anywhere at the time by my isp. I chose what I felt was a central location for the entire house. Oh well That was long before my hifi obsession, long before Spotify even.

Diagnostics is hard. Short term correlations may have pointed to one source of trouble, but eliminating it wasn't a final solution. 

Eloise is right: I ran a long wire up the stairwell and across the floor for quite a while to see if the problem was unique to wifi. (This was ages ago on a UQ1 with firmware below 3.2). I had other issues, including loss of access with the IR handset remote, but it all started with flakey loss of wifi and endless "input initializing" messages. If you have something else going on, switching to wired on an Express might not help (although if the long test using a long wire works, you should be good to go).

two other points:

A factory reset at the end of a firmware update will restore everything to a known internal status. Perhaps worth doing, and definitely worth doing if you are not already on latest version. 

I'm not sure why using a good quality line extension would be worse than wiring two cords to a single plug. Perhaps different in the UK, but solid wiring should work (and certainly for testing purposes would be an easier route, no?). 

Regards alan