Regarding the Tidal dropouts

Has it been established what is causing the Tidal dropouts? I use it daily and have never had a problem.

kev80 posted:

I've noticed, that the larger the playlist you're playing, the more often the dropouts/buffering occur. If I play a single album containing 10-15 songs, I almost never get any dropouts at all. But if I start a playlist containing 100+ songs, the dropouts start on the first song. I have the muso.

Interesting!

I think it is worth you e-mailing this issue to Naim Customer Service (support@naimaudio.com). The more feedback they get regarding dropout issues and when they occur most, the more able they will be to get a solution incorporated into the new firmware updates.

There dropouts are caused by known reasons... In simple terms it's caused  by the variable flow of the transport data from the Tidal media servers to the Naim renderer and back to the Tidal media servers.

Naim are working to within the constraints of the renderer platform to isolate the effects of these flow changes as much as possible, thereby minimising the dropouts.

Playlists are not relevant to this specific issue. If you hear some link between playlist and dropouts then it's by chance. It's worth knowing that each track queued up in the playlist isn't streamed from the same Tidal server, it is dynamically assigned by the Tidal library streaming function and is valid for a period of time for a given set of credentials... therefore for a track or playlist you might find one track fine, the next track dropouts and the following track fine... 

Simon

Thanks for that. Could it be worse with different Broadband providers? Think of swapping at the moment 

Sam

Simon

Thats interesting and possibly explains why some particular albums are often plagued by dropouts and others play fine ?

My experience is that the issue is also very time dependent -  eg just now I am playing an album that just wouldn't play yesterday evening.

I do hope this can be resolved soon - in the  meantime I have resorted to using Lumin as a control point and Bubbleupnp which allows drop-out free Tidal playing at problematic times.

Nick

Nick, Sam, I feel the effects of different ISPs will be minimal, however different access technologies may have more affect. The real issue is latency to you and just as importantly back to the Tidal server.

however if you have 4Mbps down and at least 512kbps up with minimal other load on the broadband I  be surprised if that is not fine with Tidal once Naim sort the issues out 

Out here in the sticks we just make those speeds (5Mbps down and 0.5-0.9 Mbps up) so fingers crossed for the new firmware.

I guess streaming via Bubbleupnp somehow avoids the latency issues with direct streaming to the Naim devices ? - apologies for my ignorance on these matters !

Luck you   Here we are between 3.5 and 3.8 Mbps down and around 512kbps up..(some of my village neighbours are around 1Mbps down..)  But we in my village after a bit of lobbying are due  rural Superfast with the new mini cabinets  in 2018.... Yeah

I'm currently on a 1gb fiber network in Hong Kong but I am still encountering  dropouts. I assume the problem is more on the Tidal server side where popular albums located on a server with a larger bandwidth loads fine but some older albums with located on a server with less resources with get dropouts or even timeouts when requesting? Not sure about it tho but can be sure that faster boardband not necessarily equals to no dropouts.

Nic - the dropouts are to do with latency not bandwidth - you could have 100Gb connection and it would almost certainly be the same