Wonder if anyone can help.
I got an ND5XS in April this year. I was streaming mainly ripped CDs from a QNAP NAS using 200 MBps power lines. All was fine until about a month ago when I started to experience random drop outs. The problem was mainly when listening to the hi res Beatles FLAC albums but occasionally happened on standard CD rips.
My dealer was round installing PSU and he witnessed the issue. He lent me a long
length of Ethernet cable which I tried overnight and that seemed to cure the problem.
So last weekend I hard wired my ND5 to my router using Cat 5e cable and the unit played all day Sunday with no issues at all. I have come to listen to it tonight and the problem has returned.
The dropouts sometimes occur randomly but they always occur between track and this is most noticeable on the "gap less" second side of Abbey Road for example. Where the tracks normally flow without break one into another, there is now a long gap between them whilst the buffer returns to 100%.
You can see when the dropouts are going to occur by watching he buffer % which drops 100, 90, 50, 30, Dropout. It then slowly comes back up to 100% and music restarts.
As the hardwiring seemingly hasn't fixed the problem, I suspect the ND5 needs to go back to the dealer however I thought I'd see if anyone has experienced / solved similar problems.
For information my router is the BT Home Hub 3.0.
I did initially suspect my network but I should say that the whole system worked swimmingly for 3 months + with the same router and the power lines.
Posted on: 18 August 2012 by IanG
That great thanks. Seems there is no rhyme or reason to any of this.
Enjoy your new system.
Did you use the ND5 through the DAC ? If yes, how much difference did the DAC make ?
Posted on: 18 August 2012 by HTM_1968
Originally Posted by IanG:
That great thanks. Seems there is no rhyme or reason to any of this. Enjoy your new system. Did you use the ND5 through the DAC ? If yes, how much difference did the DAC make ?
I demoed the NDX against the DAC and ND5SX as a combo and preferred the latter. I found the bare ND5SX a bit "in-yer-face" for my taste.
The DAC filled out the lower mid-range and bass and integrated the presentation as a whole, which meant that the top end was not as prominent or "shouty". This was further improved by adding an XPS2 to the DAC. Using this power supply with the streamers alone did not change my ranking. I preferred the DAC, particularly when comparing it to the DAC functions in the streamers
A difficulty I have with the NDS is that it renders my DAC redundant. Playing the DVD5, or indeed the ND5SX through the DAC and NDS suggests to me that the DAC is inferior by some margin to the NDS. As the DAC was my single favourite Naim product of the last decade by some margin, I will regret its departure....
Posted on: 18 August 2012 by Foxman50
Hi IanG I had a similar experience to yourself with the ND5SX, but mine was all hard wired with switches and not via my home hub 3. My problem disappeared after pulling my network and NAS apart and putting it all back together.
The problem returns every once in a while with 24/192 Flac files, but a quick power cycle of the ND5 cures it.
Think it's a Naim issue but doesn't happen often enough to annoy me.
Posted on: 18 August 2012 by Simon-in-Suffolk
Yep, the Naim DAC really needs to have the 555PS on it to get to sound its best. And so far I have heard an NDS/555PS on somebody else's system and there was no obvious advancement over the NDAC/555PS, especially with 16bit 44.1KHz. I look forward to a home demo with 2x 555PS on the NDS where I would expect/hope for a subtle extension in finesse over the NDAC/555PS, or perhaps I have an exceptionally good NDAC sample.
Simon
Posted on: 19 August 2012 by IanG
20 hours + and counting this weekend, the kids streaming stuff to Sky Anytime + and the dealers unit hasn't so much as skipped a beat.
That muddies the water somewhat !
My unit hasn't run that long without the drop out issues rearing their head for weeks.
Posted on: 26 August 2012 by IanG
Things have moved on this week. After the trial with the dealer unit producing no dropouts, Naim agreed to replace my unit.
I've been running this for a few days now as my dealer had one on stock and was able to pick one up straight away.
The sound is bigger, clearer and more powerful than the previous unit ever was. N-stream is much more responsive. More importantly there have been no dropouts.
Moral of the story : It may not always be your home network !
Posted on: 27 August 2012 by Simon-in-Suffolk
Yep, I hazard a guess by your description that there was a poor connection /hardware fault on the return pair connector in your ND5XS ethernet port/adapter. I suspect if you had used /borrowed a managed switch you would have seen data runts and dropped frames on the link to the ND5XS.
Glad you got it sorted.
Simon
