Muso Qb

Mine is on order, hopefully for 2 March. It's always good to hear reports from Naim owners, rather than reading reviews. 

Thanks HH.  I don't think you'll be disappointed.  Can I ask who you ordered from given I am now dealer less given the demise of UHES?

If replying is going to break forum rules I'd be very pleased if you wouldn't mind emailing me - address in my profile.

If anyone's interested in a review  -----  no not you HH .... 

HiFi World have a nice report this month (April).

And in Hi Fi+

Really looking forward to checking out the Qb at Bristol. 

Must have been designed by a man who has someone else to dust for him!

So was the response to my thinking the Qb might be a suitable present for my 'other half' who is so tolerant of my musical needs, the Qb being a self-contained little device that hopefully will sound great for its size, and would even be transportable between rooms (if only it had a handle) and would give pleasure to someone just wanting background music. I was browsing, and apparently casually showed a picture of what I gave the impression I had just seen for the first time, a wonderful cute new radio thing that could also play our stored music, with apparently an amazing quality of sound for something so small - all the while expecting a spark of pleased surprise that I might think any speaker more petite than her is worth even a second glance. Instead she just questioned the design capability of someone putting that apparently deep channel around the control screen thing rather than making a flush Join with smooth unbroken top surface...

Doesn't your cleaning lady have access to a feather duster? Ours does (for the standard MuSo), but she knows not to use to anywhere within 10 parsecs of the main system. 

Nick from Suffolk posted:

Doesn't your cleaning lady have access to a feather duster? Ours does (for the standard MuSo), but she knows not to use to anywhere within 10 parsecs of the main system. 

Cleaning erm...?

I think the original retort meant that it's better not to have dust traps in the first place.

Moving on to the question of cleaning techniques, would a feather duster be effective at removing dust from the Qb's  circular well? (I have to say i've never even considered having one, as its function seems to be to move dust around rather than remove it, personally preferring a microfibre cloth, or is my education in the cleaning department sadly lacking?)

What if said Qb was in the kitchen, where dust can sometimes be sticky?

The volume control on my S1 is a broadly similar shape/design.  Dust is less obvious in the recess around the dial than it is on the flat black top surface.

I am looking forward to hearing a Qb but I am disappointed to find that wireless support is limited to 11b/g (same as the original Mu-so) as confirmed by the new combined product manual. I don't run these legacy protocols on my wireless network, so if I were to buy a Qb I'd either have to turn on b/g support in addition to n/ac on my access point (and then have performance for all clients suffer when using the Qb) or I'd have to set up a separate access point just for the Qb.

Even if music streaming at standard resolutions doesn't require more than than 11g, only supporting these legacy protocols makes these devices rather incompatible with modern networks.

... Well, 2.4 GHz b/g might suit those wanting to penetrate walls to get to a Qb in their kitchen. On the other hand, as a relatively unregulated band there could just be more interference from the Microwave?

We shouldn't get hung up on 2.4 GHz vs 5GHz wifi bands... the latter is small and part of the band in the UK at least is shared with commercial and civil radar, and if the wifi detects radar RF for it to be legally used by the owner it has to drop back and not use that particular channel. 5 GHz can get crowded very quickly... just do a radio channel scan with a sniffer. The original 803.11a wifi protocol worked on 5Ghz, and it was a great advance when 2.4 Ghz was later used.... with its extra space.

However of more interest are the wifi protocols.. The rather old fashioned 803.11b/g are used with their very low efficiency throughput for streamed data. 803.11ac is hugely more efficient and can reach far better utilisations of the channel bandwidth available.. really useful for lossless audio streaming.

I can only assume the development cost to use the newer technology would have made the project uneconomic. It would appear, for understandable reasons, Naim use quite a modular approach to their designs.

Simon

If it helps & avoiding tech-talk .......... with 5GHz my laptop struggles from a specific point in the garden area ,  but with 2.4GHz its good.   A friend who lives in a house with a significant central stone dividing wall cannot use 5GHz on the "wrong" side of the wall,  2.4gHz is good all over the house.    

Indeed, as I say the frequency bands ( 2.45GHz 5GHz)  of the wifi channels is largely irrelevant with throughput, it's the actual wifi protocols used (803.11 a/b/g/n/ac) that make all the difference, even with navigating through crowded channel space. 

For example an 803.11g wifi connection might struggle on either 2.45 or 5GHz with say a lossless 44.1/16 bit FLAC media stream in a given location, but using the exact same wifi spectrum bandwidth, channel and identical location have absolutely no problems at all streaming it with 893.11ac. I did post some more exact figures I calculated on this a few weeks back on the forum...

Simon

Hang on. The two are not unconnected - b and g are specified to operate at 2.4 GHz, hence my comment above.

And so can  n and ac - so didn't quite see what you were getting with regard to wifi protocols chosen by Naim with respect to frequency.  Yes lower frequencies can penetrate thicker walls... but for the most part I say there is  more to wifi effectiveness with respect to protocols than frequencies unless - you are forced to only use 5GHz for some reason and your home environment prevents its effective use because you have tick stone/very thick brick walls.

'It's small, beautiful and as sweet to listen to as a counter-tenor.' The Observer magazine today - and available from Currys apparently.

Clive

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

And so can  n and ac - so didn't quite see what you were getting with regard to wifi protocols chosen by Naim with respect to frequency.  Yes lower frequencies can penetrate thicker walls... but for the most part I say there is  more to wifi effectiveness with respect to protocols than frequencies unless - you are forced to only use 5GHz for some reason and your home environment prevents its effective use because you have tick stone/very thick brick walls.

No implication that Naim chose b/g to force lower frequency. Fully agree over advantages of n and ac. It was just an attempt to inject some humour into the discussion.

Mike, Simon,

This isn't just a 2.4hz vs. 5Ghz argument (although for a wireless product launched in 2016 and with a few years expected lifetime it would be good to have a 5Ghz option). While 2.4Ghz wifi provides better range, 802.11 b/g is ancient -- why no support for 11n at least? As Simon said above, it looks like Naim reused the wireless module from the original Muso (which was already outdated when it was launched).

I'm not sure if people are aware that by running b/g devices on their routers, this reduces the bandwidth for all devices to the lowest common denominator, thereby affecting all newer 11n/a/ac clients when streaming with a Qb. Take a look at the smallnetbuilder article, "Add, Don't Replace When Upgrading to 802.11n"

"The 2.4 GHz radio on an 802.11n single or dual-band router can also work with 802.11g and even 11b devices. But these much slower devices force the router to slow down to talk to them, which means a big throughput hit. "

Unless you have a more capable wifi enabled router that supports multiple SSIDs for different protocols.. I run multiple SSIDs on different channels here... One supporting b/g/n and another supporting ac... but despite this I still run my ac with standard size channels for compatibility with other nets sharing the same bandwidth. Oh yes if you have fairly clean wifi environment and good signal quality, running short preambles on your wifi access point pumps up the throughput efficiency... having said that I have not checked that Naim support short preambles .. I assume they do.. I don't use wifi with my Naim.

But I agree a shame 802.11n at least was not supported... It's so much better suited for media streaming.

Simon

My router has a one network for 2.4 and another one for 5. This is my first router and I am not into measuring network speed, but in theory this should seperate the 2 bands, but again this is a rather cheap router so it probably does not work that way.

Claus,

Most consumer routers with a wireless AP built in work this way, so to get any mu-so to work you need to enable b/g legacy support on the 2.4Ghz band. I turned this off a long time ago over my network as I no longer have any b/g clients.

I spoke to a Naim guy at Bristol about why  the QB has ancient wifi and after a token defence along the lines of "it sounds better wired" he pretty much admitted they were using older chip sets and will hope to upgrade eventually.

I'm interested in a QB or Muso for the kitchen but I want to be able to take it out onto the patio for barbecues and summer parties - I've drilled through a wall to wire my main system but it makes bugger all sense for  the use cases of the Musos! Wireless range is absolutely fundamental. The Musos were next door to Ruark at Bristol, pretty much the same job for about half the price...

In which case, get the Ruark. 

Pev, good insights from your chat in Bristol. Absolutely agreed that the "it sounds better wired" argument doesn't apply to QB in particular. Most Qb's will be used wirelessly.

It's a range issue on wireless as well as a compatibility issue -- that is, to use a Mu-so, you have to accept degraded wireless performance for more modern devices unless you set up an AP specifically for legacy clients as recommended by smallnetbuilder.