Introducing Uniti, our revolutionary new streaming platform.

So far they've only appeared at shows and a couple of dealer events, no reports of any in the wild yet. We're rapidly running out of November if the first one is due out this month. 

ChrisSU posted:

Crabby posted:

Hungryhalibut posted:

Who's that then?

Ha ha ha thats you :-) 

just trying to bring back the discussion to the actual units and sound. Looks like I failed !!! 

 

Keep trying! I'm far more interested in that than listening to people banging on about corporate marketing.

Thanks for the back up 

HH, do us the honour of sharing the feedback of your listening session today. 

As a heads up, HH took away my doubts. He was impressed by build quality and how the Atom drove easily a pair of £6k supra. His feedback was very positive. 

I was debating keeping my uq2 but his feedback   made me forget that illico presto 

hope more people with actual listening sessions to come forward 

It's jolly good. 

It isn't finished either in firmware in the device or software on the controller. Commenting on sound quality especially given the former is unwise at present. 

jon honeyball posted:

It isn't finished either in firmware in the device or software on the controller. Commenting on sound quality especially given the former is unwise at present. 

There's me thinking I was the only one who left things last minute.

Watch "Naim Uniti Atom, Core @ RMAF 2016 | DAR__KO" on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/187919199?ref=em-v-share

Crabby posted:

Watch "Naim Uniti Atom, Core @ RMAF 2016 | DAR__KO" on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/187919199?ref=em-v-share

I wouldn't recommend clicking 'play' - it's mindbendingly irritating and it wouldn't stop on my iPad without a reboot.

G

GraemeH posted:

Crabby posted:

Watch "Naim Uniti Atom, Core @ RMAF 2016 | DAR__KO" on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/187919199?ref=em-v-share

I wouldn't recommend clicking 'play' - it's mindbendingly irritating and it wouldn't stop on my iPad without a reboot.

G

That's weird, no issue on my iPhone. You have latest firmware. You should not have any problem seeing it 

Penarth Blues posted:

Phil Harris posted:

yeti42 posted:

I was being slightly tongue in cheek with my coice of word there Phil.

I'm just very conscious that things that are posted here often get taken and built upon...

By extrapolation it would probably end up at "Phil at Naim said never to use WD Reds because they give errors all the time".

Cheers

Phil

I've already noted that I should never buy a WD Red drive and I'll let all my friends know too. Thanks Phil!

Phil

iliria posted:

jon honeyball posted:

It isn't finished either in firmware in the device or software on the controller. Commenting on sound quality especially given the former is unwise at present. 

There's me thinking I was the only one who left things last minute.

Everything is to be adjusted up to the last minute, of course. Naim is historically notorious for adjusting and adjusting and adjusting -- its the only way to get quality.

Hungryhalibut posted:

Indeed. It's total bollocks. I believed it though, when I bought my UnitiServe. Then you discover that both the Serve and dbpoweramp look at the perfectrip database, just the same. 

Hmm, that's weird. 2 years ago I tested this to check my sanity and the difference was substantial. I made several tests to verify. 

I ripped some music using US and got it onto a USB stick. Ripped same music using optimized dbpoweramp on my home PC and for devil-may-care same again with itunes. Placed all on same stick. Played the tracks via my BD player through 282/hi/250.2. The US ones were consistently better. Played the tracks for SWMBO and asked if a) there was a difference and b) if it was valuable. She much preferred the US tracks (without knowing what she was listening to) and she thought they were valuable though the US was a bit of a tall one. The dbpoweramp vs itunes was a no-brainer.

Back in the shop, I tried the same rips using our NAS drive's own server (Twonky) vs our US as a server. Significant difference and did a blind test on my colleague with same results. Again the US sounded better serving the same track as twonky via the same client (might have been NDX, might have been NDS, I forget) into our large-ish Naim system at the time. So I don't understand your experience. 

Now, whether or not the US (or Core) is value for money is another question entirely which depends on how far up the ladder you are and your future aspirations vis-a-vis your system. 

But your experience has me surprised, and a bit baffled.

Frank.

Frank Abela posted:

Hungryhalibut posted:

Indeed. It's total bollocks. I believed it though, when I bought my UnitiServe. Then you discover that both the Serve and dbpoweramp look at the perfectrip database, just the same. 

So I don't understand your experience. 

Now, whether or not the US (or Core) is value for money is another question entirely which depends on how far up the ladder you are and your future aspirations vis-a-vis your system. 

But your experience has me surprised, and a bit baffled.

Frank.

I have never understood this argument about differences in lossless files. A lossless file is just that, nothing added and nothing taken away. Am I right? If so then how can one collection of 1s and 0s sound different from the same collection of 1s and 0s?

iliria posted:

Frank Abela posted:

Hungryhalibut posted:

Indeed. It's total bollocks. I believed it though, when I bought my UnitiServe. Then you discover that both the Serve and dbpoweramp look at the perfectrip database, just the same. 

So I don't understand your experience. 

Now, whether or not the US (or Core) is value for money is another question entirely which depends on how far up the ladder you are and your future aspirations vis-a-vis your system. 

But your experience has me surprised, and a bit baffled.

Frank.

I have never understood this argument about differences in lossless files. A lossless file is just that, nothing added and nothing taken away. Am I right? If so then how can one collection of 1s and 0s sound different from the same collection of 1s and 0s?

There's a lot of similarity between homeopathic medicine and the nonsense talked about a bit not being a bit imho. It's fun arguing about both of them though!

best

David

(but I'm not an evolutionary biologist... )

And biologists know bollocks when they see them. 

iliria posted:

Frank Abela posted:

Hungryhalibut posted:

Indeed. It's total bollocks. I believed it though, when I bought my UnitiServe. Then you discover that both the Serve and dbpoweramp look at the perfectrip database, just the same. 

So I don't understand your experience. 

Now, whether or not the US (or Core) is value for money is another question entirely which depends on how far up the ladder you are and your future aspirations vis-a-vis your system. 

But your experience has me surprised, and a bit baffled.

Frank.

I have never understood this argument about differences in lossless files. A lossless file is just that, nothing added and nothing taken away. Am I right? If so then how can one collection of 1s and 0s sound different from the same collection of 1s and 0s?

But what about a lossless file with metadata and one without...? There was interesting piece in one of the mags fairly recently about this as well as transcoding in and out of lossless formats. IIRC, I think the gist of it was that a pure WAV rip without metadata and no previous lossless transcoding sounded best.  Interesting stuff. I'm not going to dismiss this out of hand just yet. I get the feeling we still have quite a bit to learn and understand on this...

Kermit posted:

Everything is to be adjusted up to the last minute, of course. Naim is historically notorious for adjusting and adjusting and adjusting -- its the only way to get quality.

 

Mmm, my experience differs, a Muso and UnitiQute that would randomly turn themselves on at different times of the day!! 

 

That's a security feature to confuse any potential burglars and make them think there's people in

Kermit posted:

Everything is to be adjusted up to the last minute, of course. Naim is historically notorious for adjusting and adjusting and adjusting -- its the only way to get quality.

 

Mmm, my experience differs, a Muso and UnitiQute that would randomly turn themselves on at different times of the day!! 

 

That's a very bold statement. 

There are indeed differences in lossless files and the article Richard alludes to was in HIFICRITIC. The view taken there was that metadata made the biggest difference to the sound. Even adding the metadata at a different point in the process of creating the file would make a difference, and quite a substantial one at that. The research continues. I don't know why the differences can occur since the data is presumably the same (though I still have my doubts about this, even with so-called bit perfect rips). Perhaps it's something to do with how and where in the file the metadata is stored. I haven't had the time, patience or inclination to check. I just tried what I tried and got vastly different results to HH. I didn't say he was wrong, just that MY experience is different from his. There could be any number of reasons why that is, both due to the hardware being discussed as well as the environmental hardware (routers, network) so quite frankly you'd be an idiot to claim that bits are just bits when there's all that mucking about with them in IP land before they even get to your renderer! 

The fact is I heard a difference, my wife heard a difference and my colleague heard a difference, and you cannot dispute that. You can't say it's psychosomatic because these were different tests at different times. Its what we heard, period. If you want to convince yourself we didn't hear it, well that's your problem, not mine, nor my wife's or colleague's. Incidentally, we were rather bemused by the results (we expected little to no difference) so we discussed what was different and we basically came to the conclusion that we were hearing the same differences. 

Frank.

Frank Abela posted:

 so quite frankly you'd be an idiot to claim that bits are just bits when there's all that mucking about with them in IP land before they even get to your renderer!

Frank.

Chill Frank One way or another we are all victims of some crappy claim made by someone somewhere.

In this case I suppose it boils down to whether an individual would pay £1600 to rip their cd collection into one type of lossless or pay nothing for another type of lossless (or just keep using their cd player for that matter). Personally, I'll stick with geting an Atom.

It's said that unitiserve outputed from net serve streamed into a net device is better than when locally direct digital into a dac. Though going through all the loops and holes and this bit and that bob to get  the net loop working at a reference level seems that this presumption is just theoretical.

DUPREE posted:

I have no idea why either on a technological basis, but I heard the same exact file played through Minim and then through a Unitiserve at my dealer and there certainly was an improvement. I am a huge skeptic of a lot of this Hi-Fi hocus pocus, but I concur with you that the difference was there. Is it possible the Uniti is decoding the flac or doing some other pre-processing before sending it to the streamer? I am very curious is the Core will wind up being audibly better than a standard NAS with Minim.. I would love any explanation why this is the case, because it defies logic, yet I heard it myself.

> On Nov 28, 2016, at 4:06 PM, Naim Audio Forums <alerts@hoop.la> wrote:
>

The Core has the potential to sound better because it dispenses with the need to stream across a network - much like Mac Mini with Audirvana, Melco, innuos Zenith, feeding a rendered stream direct into a DAC

Frank Abela posted:

Hungryhalibut posted:

Indeed. It's total bollocks. I believed it though, when I bought my UnitiServe. Then you discover that both the Serve and dbpoweramp look at the perfectrip database, just the same. 

Hmm, that's weird. 2 years ago I tested this to check my sanity and the difference was substantial. I made several tests to verify. 

I ripped some music using US and got it onto a USB stick. Ripped same music using optimized dbpoweramp on my home PC and for devil-may-care same again with itunes. Placed all on same stick. Played the tracks via my BD player through 282/hi/250.2. The US ones were consistently better. Played the tracks for SWMBO and asked if a) there was a difference and b) if it was valuable. She much preferred the US tracks (without knowing what she was listening to) and she thought they were valuable though the US was a bit of a tall one. The dbpoweramp vs itunes was a no-brainer.

Back in the shop, I tried the same rips using our NAS drive's own server (Twonky) vs our US as a server. Significant difference and did a blind test on my colleague with same results. Again the US sounded better serving the same track as twonky via the same client (might have been NDX, might have been NDS, I forget) into our large-ish Naim system at the time. So I don't understand your experience. 

...

 

Interesting observations Frank, thanks for sharing! 

Your findings (and, indeed, most of the comparisons between the outcomes of "bit-perfect" ripping on different platforms, replay of .wav and .flac files, replay of .flac files with different metadata, etc. that from time to time pop up in this forum) raise a number of interesting questions.

An obvious one is that of whether bit-perfect ripping on two different platforms yields, up to the metadata, identical files or not. In your case, this question could be answered by removing all metadata from the files. For .flac files, this can be done by running "metaflac" with the "--remove-all" option.

If ripping on the US and on your home PC resulted into identical files up to metadata, your observations would suggest that metadata can have a strong impact on sound quality.

In the other case case, your observations would suggest that "bit-perfect" ripping does not guarantee equivalent outcomes and that the US and your home PC produce genuinely different results.

That the same files sound differently when served by different UPnP servers running on different machines is not completely surprising. It would be interesting to know whether these differences are mainly due to differences in the UPnP servers, in the computing platforms, in ... the IP addresses of the devices or to aspects that we do not understand.

Perhaps we should start, whenever we come across unexpected or surprising results, to share the data required to reproduce such results. There are many platform for sharing data and protocols of experiments or tests, GitHub is what first comes to my mind. Perhaps Naim could even set up a repository for sharing intercomparison data and protocols and help making comparisons and empirical findings more understandable and reproducible.