Arcam airDAC to naimDAC for AirPlay capability instead of AirportExpress?

In theory it could improve things if it has a well engineered low jitter digital out ... Worth investigating if you can borrow one of these to try. 

The airport express has a digital out as well, so it would seem a bit costly to replace it with an arcam just to connect it to a nDac, why not just airport express to nDac?

Yes Apple's own Airport Express is dirt cheap in comparison, however it outputs a noticable deterioration in sound quality and I'd only set it aside for casual listening for a Macbook to become un-docked from the DAC (as in optical out wire removed).

If an Airplay solution for the naim DAC with sound quality ranging from quite good to very good can be achieved then that would be more convenient and docking of the Macbook needn't be required. Either way, yes, the cost of the Arcam airDAC is quite high.

If anybody does give this a go, let us know how you get on

can one not use one of these

into the mini jack socket  on the airport express to utilise it's digital optical out and connect this to the nDAC? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

SJB

The CS chip that does S/PDIF out in the AE costs about 5p and is mediocre ... the Mac Mini uses a special version of this that is much better owing to some witchcraft that I don't know the details of, by the jitter measurements are much better. Whilst you could hook a Supernova 6 from AE to DAC I'm not sure if you'd be happy with the results ... you may 

The theory/hope is that the Arcam DAC can act as a replacement for the AE and uses a decent chip for digital out ... so you'll get better sound, but haven't heard it so can't be sure 

'Tis all theory ... 

I tried to find a Blue Tooth to S/PDIF converter once as I thought APT-X might catch on ... only goes to show how wrong you can be. 

Who knows where the time goes? 

All the best, Guy 

I believe there are issues with the stability of the clocks in the latest AEs. If you go over to the pink side, you'll read of problems that the designer of the M-DAC had interfacing an AE to it:

" First first Gen worked without Drop outs when set to High Bandwidth... With Gen 3 they changed the Chip set and its even worst then the first for Jitter performance - with large discrete jumps in clock offsets - these jumps throw off (unlock) any dac with decent jitter attenuation (Tight Lock Bandwidths) - ironically Dac's with poor jitter attenuation cope with the Jumps, but off course they have poor jitter attenuation..."

and here's a similar comment from CambridgeAudio, quoted on an apple support forum:

"Basically, the Airport does not output a smooth SPDIF clocking. Every now and then, the Airport will sporadically adjust its output clock to track the desired sampling rate.
These adjustments are very sudden and are the cause of the noises and/or drop-outs describe".

That is the crux of it, the alternatives of streaming or network playing on a uPnP setup appear too much of a gamble in view of the many horror stories being posted. For sure some manage to make it work, but then too many others don't. Not knowing about the hifi politics, is anyone else curious as to how Arcam (as a similar sized British hifi brand alongside naim?) managed to implement Airplay? Perhaps it will be sorted by the time the second generation naim streamers come along, or the DAC-V2

Thanks for posting this Likes -- it matches my experience exactly.  Even with the NDS's ability (using the DAC's design) to buffer and clock out, thus eliminating S/PDIF-related jitter, I do get these Airplay/AE dropouts.  It's not a big deal if I am just surfing for new music using Spotify, but if I want to listen to an entire album, I'll switch over to Asset's PC sound capture and a hard-wired UPnP connection (which works flawlessly).

Hook

Well I'm thankful for suck knowledgeable contributors here.

I was toying with getting an AE digital out to my Uniqute to give me spotify. Seems this is not altogether the brilliant idea I thought it was!

SJB