Do you think Naim should (or could) retrofit Qobuz to the 272 with an update?

This has been discussed here in extenso...

Ok, sorry - I'll search for it.

Jim

The short answer is no. It took them a lot of effort to integrate Tidal, and with the new generation of streamers, they chose instead to add Airplay and Chromecast to provide a wider range of connection options. If Qobuz is important to you, I would go for the Bubble option that has been widely discussed here. 

Thanks Chris - will do.

Jim

...and unfortunately Chromecast fails miserably  - no gapless, and since Qobuz App updates a few months ago each track in an album seems to glitch by repeating from the start after 2-3 seconds of playback on my Nova.  No idea if it's a Niam or Qobuz issue but it's beyond frustrating.

Audirvana works flawlessly with Qobuz to Naim

R.K posted:

Audirvana works flawlessly with Qobuz to Naim

It doesn't in my experience, I've had it for several years and it fails miserably with my Nova, though I may need to revisit recent releases to see if they've improved on things.

If you want Qobuz, in my experience Bubble UPNP is the only viable option. Chromecast, unless I am doing something wrong which is a distinct possibility, is beyond awful.

Alley Cat posted:

R.K posted:

Audirvana works flawlessly with Qobuz to Naim

It doesn't in my experience, I've had it for several years and it fails miserably with my Nova, though I may need to revisit recent releases to see if they've improved on things.

What does not work for you? It works perfectly for me, except it crashes a couple of times on bad, corrupted albums.

Camlan posted:

If you want Qobuz, in my experience Bubble UPNP is the only viable option. Chromecast, unless I am doing something wrong which is a distinct possibility, is beyond awful.

It sounds like you may be doing something wrong with Chromecast.

If you use Android as the Chromecast server and cast the screen rather than the casting from the app, it tends to work better.
You need a stable WiFi setup (preferably 5GHz to reduce interference issues).
You also need to use the optical connection to a decent DAC.

On a 272 it's not as good as a well tuned UPnP setup, but it's not that much behind (similar to the difference between WAV and FLAC) and can cope with 24/192 FLAC.

Huge posted:

Camlan posted:

If you want Qobuz, in my experience Bubble UPNP is the only viable option. Chromecast, unless I am doing something wrong which is a distinct possibility, is beyond awful.

It sounds like you may be doing something wrong with Chromecast.

If you use Android as the Chromecast server and cast the screen rather than the casting from the app, it tends to work better.
You need a stable WiFi setup (preferably 5GHz to reduce interference issues).
You also need to use the optical connection to a decent DAC.

On a 272 it's not as good as a well tuned UPnP setup, but it's not that much behind (similar to the difference between WAV and FLAC) and can cope with 24/192 FLAC.

Presumably that would mean that the signal goes via the Android device, rather than straight from router to streamer? I’ve generally found that there’s a price to pay in sound quality when the signal gets bounced around your network like that, so it would be nice if it worked as intended. 

If you're getting gaps in playback then either Quobuz itself inherently doesn't support gapless playback through Chromecast from it's own servers or it's operating the network like that anyway.

But as Qobuz seems to be a very popular and appropriate streaming service aming Naim owners, would it not make sense to add it retrospectively to the 272 (and other streamers) in a future software update?

Naim have said that it won’t happen. It’s just too much work to set up and maintain. There are various ways of doing it that are just as good, such as Bubble on a nas. You may as well just let it drop. 

As said above, if you want Qobuz with Naim streamers use the free BubbleSoft software running on a Mac, pc, RPi, some NAS etc.. gapless works well Qobuz as well as well as potentially transcoding Qobuz FLAC to WAV.

Ok - once I get the Asset/dbPowerAmp software working, hopefully it will all fall into place.

thanks

Jim

I've recently added a MELCO N1ZH/2 as a source into N272 , that can be used to stream Qoboz.  In fact just about to start the months free trial, now that MELCO has this week released an ipad app to control it.

Frank Yang posted:

Alley Cat posted:

R.K posted:

Audirvana works flawlessly with Qobuz to Naim

It doesn't in my experience, I've had it for several years and it fails miserably with my Nova, though I may need to revisit recent releases to see if they've improved on things.

What does not work for you? It works perfectly for me, except it crashes a couple of times on bad, corrupted albums.

Audirvana Plus works flawlessly for me from Qobuz to Naim Mu-so but as [@mention:71539985729025468] reports it doesn't work reliably to Nova yet.

However, I am optimistic that Audirvana Qobuz to Nova will soon work (including gapless playback)

david

I would recommend Qobuz / Audirvana, and this is what I am using.

Thanks all - so is Audirvana Plus an alternative Bubble software to 'Illustrate' products like Asset and dbPowerAmp?

Does one have to choose to get one or the other of these ways of decoding and playing music files?

And is Roon a third alternative? Or that something else (mainly for metadata)?

Frank, what streamer do you have?

JimDog posted:

Thanks all - so is Audirvana Plus an alternative Bubble software to 'Illustrate' products like Asset and dbPowerAmp?

Does one have to choose to get one or the other of these ways of decoding and playing music files?

And is Roon a third alternative? Or that something else

Roon is an alternative to the UPnP server on your NAS. You can also access your Tidal account through it if you have one, but not Qobuz etc. 

I use several ways to listen to Qobuz. You do not have to choose one. For Qobuz > Audirvana Plus it depends on which Naim device you are sending to. I can only speak for Mu-so (works perfectly for CD quality and  Hi-Res, is gapless) and Nova (various issues). The Nova has similar issues with BubbleUPnP server. In both cases (Audirvana and BubbleUPnP)  we are sending a UPnP track to the Naim device. The Mu-so handles end of track differently to the Nova and the latter sometimes misses a track change. Also, currently, neither can play gaplessly to Nova. I'm optimistic that this will be fixed soon and that the Nova will be able to play from Qobuz reliably (including gapless. Note that I am not talking about Nova built-in or external Chromecast which has other issues.

This is different to playing from a UPnP server (Core, MinimServer, Asset) where there are no problems with playing gapless from ripped files.

david

JimDog posted:

Thanks all - so is Audirvana Plus an alternative Bubble software to 'Illustrate' products like Asset and dbPowerAmp?

Does one have to choose to get one or the other of these ways of decoding and playing music files?

And is Roon a third alternative? Or that something else (mainly for metadata)?

Frank, what streamer do you have?

I am using a MM running Audirvana connecting directly to a Naim DAC via spdif, that way I can play Tidal / Qobuz.
For UPnP, I am using a non-Naim streamer, and it works with the MM/Audirvana very well.
I also have a NAS with Asset/DbPowerAmp to play locally stored music.

Frank Yang posted:

JimDog posted:

Thanks all - so is Audirvana Plus an alternative Bubble software to 'Illustrate' products like Asset and dbPowerAmp?

Does one have to choose to get one or the other of these ways of decoding and playing music files?

And is Roon a third alternative? Or that something else (mainly for metadata)?

Frank, what streamer do you have?

I am using a MM running Audirvana connecting directly to a Naim DAC via spdif, that way I can play Tidal / Qobuz.
For UPnP, I am using a non-Naim streamer, and it works with the MM/Audirvana very well.
I also have a NAS with Asset/DbPowerAmp to play locally stored music.

Audirvana is available on Windows 10, too.

Frank Yang posted:

Alley Cat posted:

R.K posted:

Audirvana works flawlessly with Qobuz to Naim

It doesn't in my experience, I've had it for several years and it fails miserably with my Nova, though I may need to revisit recent releases to see if they've improved on things.

What does not work for you? It works perfectly for me, except it crashes a couple of times on bad, corrupted albums.

Primarily gapless on a Nova.  New Naim streamers handle things differently it seems.  It's never worked reliably for me with Qobuz in all honesty.  Play an album and it stops/pauses bewteen or during tracks.  The transport controls have always felt very sluggish too.

Worse with streamed audio from Qobuz but could not achieve gapless with local files either.

So, while you may be able to recommend it, that may be because of your specific hardware/connection combinations.