NDS vs Squeezebox touch; the devil is in the firmware, or how to listen to track 1 of all your albums.

Lately I have had access to both and SBT and an NDS. The latter is juiced up with my XPS-CR (cough). I had been preferentially using the SBT for the last couple of weeks due to its greatly better interface. The NDS did get some use for the more critical listening, although to be honest there wasn't as large as a gap between the SBT (using its analog outputs) and the NDS as I had hoped. 

The NDS did sound more 'grippy' and dynamic, with the SBT sounding a little bloomy at the bottom and dark at the top. But not the sort of OMFG differences that the price differential would allow you to expect. 

The NDS came pre-installed with the (very) old ver 3.3 firmware, in spite of the dealers assurance that it had the latest updates. I was a bit hesitant to do the updates as they sounded quite a bit more involved than the 'plug in and auto everything' ease of the nDAC update. 

First I had to order a USB to data mini USB plug. That took a week to get here. 

Install Naim updater package-check. 

Skin my fingers and wrists getting out the NDS and XPS-CR and lugging them over to my desktop PC. Plug NDS into it via the above cable and start reading...

'Requires wired internet connection'.......My desktop is on the other side of the house from the router etc. So I unplug all the wires and move the two boxes across to the other room that houses both a router and another PC. 

Download both Naim streamer update software and the required drivers for the mini USB cable. 

Wait...this PC hasn't got any unzip software. 

Download a trial version of the latest WInzip. Unpack the Naim software. 

Follow the onscreen instructions, which turn out to be quite explicit. 

Powering off and on brings up the internet radio station that was last used. So time to cart the units back to the bookshelf housing the gear (my Fraim stack is in the garage supporting toolboxes BTW). 

Reskin fingers and wrists getting units back into their slots and hooking up the Burndy, power cable and interconnects. 

Power on......'No Network'. 

Have to enter password to Wifi, making several miskeys that apparently cannot be edited and the process has to be restarted. Three times. Is there a back-arrow button on either the remote or on the main fascia??

Wifi connected!!

Cue up the 'Audiophile' Baroque station at 320 kb/s. 

Is this even the same piece of gear that I had playing just an hour or so ago? The sound is quite unrecognizable from its previous guise. Bigger, fuller, richer, more involving....and for the first time actual spatial information with stuff happening between the speakers. I flip through radio stations....stuff at 128 kb/s is now sounding better than the 320 material did with the earlier firmware. 

Time to try a few albums.....start flipping through. The Naim app only 'sees' the first track in every album. So I play a few first tracks. 

Beautiful clarity and vocal inflections that were simply absent before.  Much better than 320 radio. So good, I almost did not miss tracks 2,3,4.....n-1, n on all of the albums. This is the most 'hair-shirt' upgrade I have ever done. 

Read forum. It says to reboot the NDS. Reboot the NDS....recheck the albums. Still only the first track shows up. But...DAMN, do they sound fine. 

I may end up just taking the digital out of the SBT and putting it into the NDS, and use the much less buggy Squeezer app. 

BTW, the analog outputs of the SBT.....they now sound fairly toxic by comparison. But at least I can move on to the second album track!

Maybe firmware ver 5.0 will play all the tracks...backwards. Great of LZ maybe, or the chiral works of JSB.

Any one has an idea how I can get 4.4 to recover the missing parts of my album collection?

Did I say the sound was very much better than the earlier software. I liken the differences to those of moving from a Hi- to a Supercap-something I have done on many pieces of gear.