UnitiQute 24/96 discontinued!

To those who are worried about new streaming formats, can you point to a format that has gained just a little popularity,so  digital streamer/servers has been unusable in the last 10 years?

digital replay in the last 10 years?

Claus

This notion was pretty well de-bunked in a thread here recently.  The current uPnP standard has been around since 2006 (I believe).  .wav has been around since 1991.  Flac has been around since 2001.

Which aspects are you worried about in particular?  (If it's DSD, currently a very niche product, I can state that you are in the vast minority by worrying about it taking over in the very near future.)  Is there another format that will push .flac and .wav and Apple's formats the way of VHS anywhere on the horizon?  Do you think that Apple will stand by and watch that happen? (Not that we are wedded to Apple's formats at all, but the Naim stuff does decode it.)  And remember what happened when Sony introduced their own lossy format (most people have long forgotten ATRAC).

And which of my current hardware will stop working when something new comes along?  (I feel that Naim are pretty far out there in terms of offering hardware upgrades for older models.  No they did not offer DR upgrades for olive ps's, but it's not like those ps's stopped working, or worked any worse, when the DR's were released.)

I too had some 'paranoia' about 'investing' in digital playback because I was worried about my stuff getting out of date too quickly.  I did some research and concluded otherwise.  But certainly we all have our own tolerances for change, and the costs of change.

The 192/32 unitiqute is the same price as the 24/196 version, prior to the launch of the former. The 24/196 version was reduced in price following the launch of the 192/32 model.

Gerry

Guido, Caus, Bart, jobseeker

Granted nothing is truly futureproof, but my feeling is that a computer is likely to serve for longer and provide more flexibility than a Naim streamer, simply because it is likely that it will continue to support new software for longer. Also when it does finally require replacement this will be a lot less costly.

It seems to me that a computer makes more sense than to be locked-in to a particular manufacturer's proprietry streaming solution - and a very expensive one too. To be fair my views are probably coloured by the need for me to be as thrifty as possible. If I had money to burn then I would not be unduly worried about this. However I do favour a computer/DAC approach over streaming over a network anyway, so again my views to be fair are probably coloured by this. I happen to think that network steaming is a pretty cumbersome and overly-complex way of listening to music, though I can see the attraction for multi-room listening.

At the end of the day although network streaming is obviously the "in thing" I'm far from convinced that it is the future of home audio - it may well go the way of the 8-track cartridge of old. I've absolutely no evidence for this, it's just a gut feeling.

For those happy to invest in Naim streamers then obviously they will be getting top-drawer sound from a superbly built product, no question.

Peter

FWIW: I had a 24/96 Qute at the point I got my 202/250. I used the Qute as an analog input to the 202. That was rather inconvenient, so I traded it in for a ND5 XS. If the ND5 sounds better it is not a huge difference to me, as I didn't notice sound quality improvement. I bought it mostly for convenience and support for ALAC files. I would have been happy to keep my Qute if it had fixed line-level analog output. It was not cheap to make the change.

I asked Naim Audio about sound quality differences between the two boards - their answer was simple and clear - there is NONE! - NO sound quality change between the two boards-only that due to the highest bit rate!

Brilliant

Thanks for your post. I love my Qute and I would only upgrade the board for better sound not 24/192. A recent board upgrade done locally caused connectivity issues and that Qute is back at Sound Organization for resolution. In my case I don't want to mess with success.