Linn KDS vs NDS

He will surely do this ... after he finishes listening the next track on his beloved KDS/1 

(hope he is not reading this )

My 555PS-DR is back home already and still waiting for ... me to get back home one day and check the changes 

Let's share the views after audition! I hope to report before Christmas.

I hope you do too. Looking forward to that. Mine hasn't gone in yet.

Heard from Phil this morning that my NDS has arrived and the 555PS is back too!  He's coming tomorrow afternoon to install them.  

Unfortunately I have not had the pleasure of a direct comparison between the KDS and NDS, it was a couple of months ago now that I last listened to the KDS at length, but it never really did it for me, it was really smooth, detailed, layered with great separation but I just never found it engrossing, it did everything right but I was never pulled into the music in the way the NDS does, it holds you attention, you really can get lost in it, there really is a realism that is totally captivating. As agreed today in a demo with some fellow Naim owners, the NDS is the closest digital has ever sounded to vinyl, which I found quite funny really as we have spent all these years trying to get back to a sound that we had 25 years ago, but I guess now we have the convenience of controlling it from our sofa via an iPad though. 

We are running the NDS on a 282/250 and when going from the NDX to the NDS the differences are quite clear to hear, I can only imagine how a full reference system with the NDS/555ps would sound.

Talking about differences, today with a couple of guys in, we tried the Flac v Wav comparison, Flac ripped to level 5 compression with dBpoweramp and WAV ripped on the HDX, playing the same track non of us expected to hear a difference but in the end we all agreed that the WAV had more body and weight with real presence and the Flac sounded a little light and empty, really didn't expect such a difference between 2 lossless formats really, looks like Naim were spot on going with WAV.

Paul, WAV and FLAC do sound different if a duty of decoding is assigned to a streamer.

But if you assign Asset uPnP to do the decoding job on PC and send the decoded bitstream to a streamer I would be very surprised if you can hear any difference.

Which of those two cases are you referring to?

OT AMA, if you don't mind: as you have a Transporter, do you have any idea (or checked the documentation or forums for that matter -- I'm being lazy here) of the difference between transcoding to 'PCM' or to 'WAV' with the Logitech Media Server ? I use PCM (except for FLAC as I never found a way to downsample hi-res files on the server, where as the streamer knows how to do it) but never really dig the difference.

MMmm, that is a good question AMA, the WAV files are on the HDX and the Flac files are sitting on my Qnap NAS drive with Twonky acting as the server, I assumed that Twonky was doing the decoding, would that be correct?

Asset server can broadcast the raw FLACs or decode the original FLACs to WAV on the fly -- depending on the status of the check box in settings. In this case streamer will be receiving the uncompressed WAV as if it was stored on HDD. The computation power of PC is big enough to decode on the fly -- which is not the case for streamers.

I guess there is a similar setting in Twonky -- just check the Manual. 

I still use SlimServer which is set to WAV. I never tried LMS... 

Twonky on my QNAP NAS doesn't do the transcoding.  That's one of the reasons that I have Asset installed on my laptop.  Playing back FLAC files on my new NDS (and on the NDX until today), if I use Twonky, nStream shows the file as FLAC, but if I use Asset the file is shown as WAV.  Hope that answers your question.  Now ... back to listening to music via my new toy ...  

From my experience with Qnap, Twonky does not decode to wav, so it's more than likely that you passed on a flac stream to the NDS.

It seems that Asset is really a winner in uPnP server market.

I have two built-in servers on my Buffalo NAS: Twonki and Logitech SlimServer.

I always ignore them and pull the music with Asset uPnP installed on a dedicated laptop.

Highly recommended.

Another vote for Asset - it was designed as an Audio uPnP server, so does what we need well and does not worry about other stuff.

Sorry to be be boring - but another thumbs up for Asset. I have version 4 running on a micro WHS machine - and it just works.

Simon

Can asset be installed on a qnap nas,then, to be used in place of twonky?

(Have just put Parallels on my mac so I can get dbpoweramp for ripping but slightly unnerved By the reports of wav sounding better than flac)

'fraid not... Asset needs a windows platform.

Thanks. Keep thinking I am getting things sorted as to best approach but then...

You might try minimserver. It can now transcode from FLAC to WAV on the fly and seems to run on (some?) QNAP servers. Installation is a bit involved: http://minimserver.com/install-qnap.html

Apart from that minimserver is very good at tagging and creating browse trees.

Thanks again, though I think that looks like a step too far for me! I may just go with dbpoweramp /flac for now...

Lack of artwork would be a dealbreaker for me.  I think I'll stick with Asset running on my laptop for now.

Not really listening to my new NDS as I've developed a stinking cold with the usual accompanying partial deafness.  Still, it'll give it time to warm up properly.