Airplay & Naim - Long Way To Go

Just to be clear Songcast is actually not 'windows shit' ......and as RH says It works very easily and consistently on both MAC and PC. It will stream up to CD resolution (44.1/16) and is really good with Spotify for example.

I concur with you, John Zorn is one of the most interesting jazz musician around: he is also, may be, the most eclectic musician ever being the leader and/or composer of groups as various as “acoustic Masada” that sounds like the classic Ornette Coleman Quartet, “electric Masada” that is something between Tony Lifetime Lifetime and the Shadows, “Naked City” and “Pain Killer” which plays some very noisy rock, a string quartet, ..

I am not so keen on the “homage” recordings however.

The Kiko is likely to do well - Linn have a mature streaming product selection now - clearly differentiated by price ( were Linn the reason Naim started down the streaming path) and with few of the customer hostile foibles remaining to annoy those moving into digital. 

Songcast works really well as does Kinsky - with Internet updates on less.

Active speakers - so adding passives wouldn't work for obvious reasons - nothing to stop you adding different actives if you really felt the need.

True it won't sound as good as an NDX powered Ovator Spewing setup - but I haven't heard a Linn system that didn't sound pretty good and the whole thing costs less than a Uniti2

Interesting.

Tog

I haven't heard a Kiko yet, but looking at the Kiko has Linn gone further into B&O territory?

I imagine it would make a great office/second system. The active speakers are interesting especially in a all in one product.

Why don't Meridian get mentioned in the same threads as Naim and Linn?  They seem to have a few interesting streaming options too, and my buddy (mate) in Cambridge is pretty well married to Meridian kit.

He heard my Naim system when he visited a few months ago and was jealous however

That'll be why, then.  

It is worth considering where the digital/streaming route is taking us - 

In a few years willbe be looking at a complete digital path without analogue or analogue amplification at all?

Tog

Where does the d to a happen? 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_speakers

Meridian already do it ... heard the system a couple of years and very impressive: in fact only thing I didn't like was the sound. 

I think that's probably the future too.  I had a hard time buying into the active speaker concept (upgrage/change path requires one to change the speakers AND the amplification) when I looked at a Meridian system last year, but maybe I'm just a luddite

Active speakers make a lot of sense, and get around inefficient crossovers. However class D really comes into its own for efficiency and cheap manufacture. There are many challenges to making a high quality class D amp, but things are improving. It will be interesting to see how well it competes in moderate power 2 channel setup. I think for home cinema surround sound it will however become de facto.

The term 'digital amp' seems to confuse. It is an analogue amplifier but uses the speaker as its transfer function whilst using a comparator driver rather than relying on the linearity of the output transistors. A digital amp has nothing to do with SPDIF etc........

Simon

"class D" does not mean "digital".  no one is here know what they are talking about.

@Patrick - no one has said it does - would you accept that they involve signicantly more digital processing than say a class A/B amplifier?

@Simon - not a simple route but both Hypex and B&O make very successful amplification modules used by many other audiophile companies.

Tog

Just because an amplifier uses digital circuitry (and not all Class D amps do) somewhere in the chain does not make it a "digital" amp.  I am sure you can find controllers in A, A/B, B, amps.  It is all still voltage and current and very much "analog".

The fact that the shittiest sounding amplifiers in cars, jukeboxes, HT Receivers, are typically Class D should sway people from being attracted to a "theoretically" 100% efficient amp.

But..... i dont know anything about the topic so Im not sure why my drunk ass chimed in last night.  Sorry.

-Patrick (HUNGOVER!)

Ha Ha Ha.. Great post Patrick.. What a chuckle.