Naim DACs

I have no knowledge but I can’t imagine they have given up.  Aren’t these things cyclical?  Perhaps all the effort has gone into the Unitis and the next new stuff will take a little while.  

A Statement level streamer was in development and probably still is. The DAC in that will need to be something special and I expect that if it ever comes to fruition, it will pop up, in various states of tune, in other parts of the range. I don't think Naim technically ever give up on anything.  The non appearance of a desired product does not necessarily mean they have "given up".

Relax, all will be well.  The next Naim DAC will have USB, and will make the NDS and all the Hugo-ish things sound broken.  

N.B I have no idea what I am talking about.

SongStream posted:

N.B I have no idea what I am talking about.

No offense, but I am relieved to hear that.

Harry posted:

SongStream posted:

N.B I have no idea what I am talking about.

No offense, but I am relieved to hear that.

None taken, I wouldn't have thought you needed such reassurance. 

seakayaker posted:

Now Playing......

Edwin McCain - The Austin Sessions

Going back a bit in time to visit with Edwin....... A great voice and lovely guitar.

Landed in the wrong thread, but to be honest, much more interesting, ;-)

Harry posted:

A Statement level streamer was in development and probably still is. The DAC in that will need to be something special and I expect that if it ever comes to fruition, it will pop up, in various states of tune, in other parts of the range. I don't think Naim technically ever give up on anything.  The non appearance of a desired product does not necessarily mean they have "given up".

 

They don’t give up on anything except tone arms, replacement parts for CD players, or speakers.

well the NDAC and DAC V1 still sound fine to me, why does they need a replacement?

any development would have to ensure that it would sell well to the wide public. the market is saturated with dacs,, the last 20 yrs  the dac was built into cdp ,now each streamer  product will have it own dac.   easy access to streaming services, good app operation and auto updating seem more important than tweaking dacs

SongStream posted:

seakayaker posted:

Now Playing......

Edwin McCain - The Austin Sessions

Landed in the wrong thread, but to be honest, much more interesting, ;-)

I was wondering where that posting went........

Nowadays with all the innovation in digital it is quite tempting to get very excited about new boxes when the existing ones are very good and maybe not so easy to make huge improvements on.

If I had an NDAC, I would add a superlumina Din/DIN interconnect to an it instead, a much higher level of performance.

I guess it depends whether one get more satisfaction from added resolution or more musical energy, for me I'd rather have more musical energy (which SL is able to deliver in spades)

analogmusic posted:

well the NDAC and DAC V1 still sound fine to me, why does they need a replacement?

They sound fine, of course, but so did the 172 and does the 272. I am not expecting a new DAC every second year. But DAC technology has improved during the last decade and popular network players like the microRendu, the ultraRendu or the new sMS-200ultra are designed to feed outstanding DACs with, among others, USB inputs.

audio1946 posted:

any development would have to ensure that it would sell well to the wide public. the market is saturated with dacs,, the last 20 yrs  the dac was built into cdp ,now each streamer  product will have it own dac.   easy access to streaming services, good app operation and auto updating seem more important than tweaking dacs

Good points but isn't the market saturated with almost everything?

analogmusic posted:

To my ears ppl get very excited about new boxes when the existing ones are very good

...

?

analogmusic posted:

...

Add a superlumina to an Ndac instead, a much higher level of performance 

I have added a SL to my nDAC. It is a fine cable but, in retrospect, I am not sure that it brings substantial improvements. Some more details and a little bit more openness in the heights, perhaps. In contrast, the latest nDAC firmware upgrade was a very substantial improvement in my view.

analogmusic posted:

well the NDAC and DAC V1 still sound fine to me, why does they need a replacement?

Other than for the money you can probably get a better standard of replay if you were to design now.... working in the industry one of the things I am really excited about is the recent advancement of virtual machines such as FPGAs etc which really add a huge boost to performance and  capability of devices which only a few years ago would have required unrealistic amounts of investment and production runs to achieve similar results using ASICs etc... the recent revolution has moved on from coding and software and  has been of low powered, performant miniturised  virtual hardware. Back in the world of DACs and their supporting filters we know the best performance requires a lot of processing power and/or memory bandwidth, and hitherto  has been a real limiter in terms of cost and electro magnetic and heat side effects. Recent hardware technology has opened new design possibilities and moved the boundary of compromise.

analogmusic posted:

Nowadays with all the innovation in digital it is quite tempting to get very excited about new boxes when the existing ones are very good and maybe not so easy to make huge improvements on.

Agree. I do not have any need to replace my nDAC. But I would like to think that Naim has not given up on this line of products. After months of discussion on the new Uniti line and on software integration, a simple device that exploits new hardware technologies and for which it is worth writing a whitepaper would be a refreshing surprise, I believe. Just my two cents, of course.

analogmusic posted:

well the NDAC and DAC V1 still sound fine to me, why does they need a replacement?

LOL! They might surprise us yet. But admittedly, this is unlikely.

They won't build something they can't make money on or obtain parts for, and in fairness, they can't magic up discontinued CD mechanisms, although they have taken steps to improve this situation. The speaker thing may have more than a sprinkling of politics in it. I heard they didn't sell in big numbers. Don't know if that's universally true.

The big innovations in digital happened in the 1980s. Outboard DACs with all sorts of cleverness in them appeared, proliferated and mostly died out. There has recently been a resurgence. They do more things. They can connect to more things. Innovation? Hardly.

Harry posted:

The big innovations in digital happened in the 1980s. Outboard DACs with all sorts of cleverness in them appeared, proliferated and mostly died out. There has recently been a resurgence. They do more things. They can connect to more things. Innovation? Hardly.

I think that the DAC, no matter whether integrated in a streamer, preamp or as a stand alone device, is a crucial component in a replay system. There have been major developments in DSP and DAC design since the eighties, look for instance at the Chord line of products.

Not at all. That's just marketing.

Harry posted:

Not at all. That's just marketing.

I am not sure. At least sizes and power consumption seem to have quite dramatically decreased over the past 20-30 years. I cannot judge about sound quality, I have not compared the Naim DAC (or older DACs) to more modern devices.

As I said the real innovation is the virtual hardware available and the implementation  ... DACs and their filters from naughties, nineties and the crude eighties were limited by performance, miniturisation and electrical thermal noise... recent low power high density FPGA hardware has opened up new possibilities that were previously only theoretically possible  ... or would have required such mass production investment it would have been impractical and uneconomic for the higher end  audio replay industry.. as after all truly accurate signal construction is processing intensive. We are in a golden age of low power devices and virtual machine design... and in other areas these new capabilities are powering the emerging IoT space... exciting times... and we in the audio replay world are well placed to take advantage.. with better lower cost capabilities and forging innovation... and manufacturers like Xilinx and Analog Devices making specific devices suitable for audio filtering. Interestingly Naim use Analog Devices DSP and Chord Electronics use Xilinx.