Tidal Firmware Update?

I don't think returning something that doesn't work is rebellious. If the unit is faulty you should get your money back and buy something that works. 

To be fair, when I bought my NDS, Tidal integration was not included - so I did not buy it for that. I will investigate being part of the B team, but am between computers at the moment so will need to get that sorted first.

This is my situation also. The NDS was bought to play pack CD and higher resolution files stored on a NAS on our home network. A job that it does brilliantly. Not remotely interested in subscription based streaming. Sounds like a waste of a good NDS (in this house).

But others have different needs. If the NDS was bought with this capability and is failing it should go back, like any other hardware item which doesn't work properly (I've sent a Corsair keyboard back to Amazon today. Irritating but routine procedure for faulty hardware).

If it was bought in the expectation that such a feature WILL be made available I have zero understanding. Unless the purchaser was deliberately misled. It's unfortunate that the feature was released buggy but Naim will fix it.  Get your money back if the equipment was sold with the feature. 

I agree that folk who have bought a Naim streamer since October last year are entitled to cross about the delay. I bought mine before streaming subscription services were added so it's less frustrating.

I bought my NDS pre Tidal but I have very much enjoyed Tidal as an additional music source, discovering some wonderful new music and some wonderful new artists. It was however very frustrating when I was experiencing drop outs and that kind of failure is unacceptable. These days drop outs are rare and I am more interested in optimising the SQ available from Tidal - hence my interest in the progress of the FW update.

Tidal however is a secondary source of music for me, but I use it for more than just 'discovery'. Having said this, for me the primary function of the NDS has been, and will always be, the replay of ripped CDs and hi res downloads. It seems weird that anyone would buy such an expensive streamer to primarily play music from a subscription service. Surely not?

If you pay £19.99 (or foreign currency equivalent) per month for Tidal and you are still suffering drop outs then this is unacceptable. But who do you blame, your ISP, t'internet, Tidal, Naim, your own LAN installation? There is or course no guarantee that the much anticipated FW update will fix the drop out issue. We will have to wait and see. 

In theory Tidal hifi should be same/similar to cd rips, this is why we are paying the double of standart subscription, and there is no shame for a expensive 16/44 source, remember cd555?

I like tidal very much for discovery and mix taping, wife music

Absolutely - there are three differences I have measured which seem to affect SQ between Tidal streaming of FLAC and home streaming of WAV.

1) Tidal sends FLAC media - most with Naim stream WAV media - because they hear a difference on their equipment between rendering from FLAC and rendering from WAV.

2) The inter timing variation between media packets seems to affect the SQ on Naim streamers (measured and assessed on an NDX with various firmwares). I have found the inter timing variation from Tidal can vary significantly resulting in differing SQ. Home streaming is often (in my experience) more consistent  here on inter frame / packet timing - albeit not perfect - but  can vary on real time transcoding and the loading on the NAS/media server etc.

3) The Naim streamer seems to work optimally when the TCP stack on the streamer works in a specific mode - determined by the end to end TCP throughput - resulting in the use of zero window size flow control. However with Tidal the throughput can vary and when the throughput is of a level where a more dynamic window exchange occurs between the Naim streamer and Tidal media server - SQ seems to fall off slightly.

Simon

Hi Simon,

Are you saying that 2) and 3) can lead to variable sound quality, from one moment to the next?

Keith

yes in theory - but I have tended to notice it more from track to track or even album to album - as they can often be sourced from different IP addresses and servers. I have also noticed it changing at different times of the day sometimes.

With respect to point 2) I have done some 'controlled' measurements using home streaming equipment and servers - and I see these characteristics repeated with Tidal but exaggerated.

I am coming around to the idea that this might explain in part the SQ the differences between differing streaming transport equipment - as any impact to SQ can  to my mind only be produced by processing noise generated by the streamer... kind of like the difference between FLAC and WAV decode.

If you think about it it starts to become more obvious as USB and Ethernet involves a fairly complex digital electronics state  machine and the switching/modulation of transmission lines - both renown for producing electrical noise... not what you ideally want next to sensitive analogue circuitry.. or precision clocks.

Strange... i am trying Tidal and have not noticed any dropouts or any particular SQ issues, but my main focus for my NDS is not internet streaming.

Why is it strange? Must admit never come across a SQ issue on Tidal.. but used to get dropouts occasionally.. But dropouts hugely improved I think for most in the forthcomg firmware.

Remember given my above provisos in the above posts as far as your NDS is concerned there is no difference between Internet streaming and local streaming .. it's the same FLAC media assuming you locally stream FLAC ... and the masters are the same. 

Simon

I've never been that great at articulating what I hear in words but somehow the Tidal streaming doesn't sound as good to me as local streaming. Maybe it's the content and honestly I just setup Tidal yesterday so not much listening via the NDS. But local streaming sounds better to my ears. There's a missing ambience to the Tidal sound. It's smaller and shut-in compared to the music coming from my NAS.

I actually prefer Europaradio (1,000 Kbps Lossless Uncompressed FLAC) on vTuner over Tidal. I have no issues with dropouts with either.

I didn't buy an NDS for Tidal or any other streaming service because I've never expected much from them. In my car with a Mark Levinson stereo, I find satellite radio unlistenable.

This is sort of like upsampling to me. How can you take something and make it look or sound better than the original by "filling in" the gaps? This is artificial and I don't particularly like it. I think Naim is trying to satisfy the demand and be competitive since other companies are offering it but I think it's great that Naim will only release an update once they are satisfied with the sq - it's one of the reasons I stay with Naim.

Arun

Listening to Led Zep's 'How the West Was Won' just now via NDX Chord Hugo TT & 250DR Tidal and it sounds excellent. I'm totally absorbed...No desire to analyze the micro-sonics.

G

Belated thanks to Trevor for the update.  A question for the technical team:

If I'm not mistaken the emphasis now seems to be on sound quality, whereas originally it was both on drop outs and SQ.  Could there be a solution where a drop outs solution is released while the SQ development is ongoing?  I appreciate any SQ improvement will be appreciated by all Tidal users, but a drop out solution would at least make Tidal useable for those of us who still have issues.

Granted, I bought my NDX for streaming my own ripped content - but I HAVE been paying £20 pm for Tidal for 8 months in anticipation that the solution is imminent.  The problems are variable, but significant.  Yesterday managed 15 mins before first dropout.  Tonight, 5 seconds.  FYI I've spoken separately to Tidal and implemented all of their network config recommendations.

M

Arun Mehan posted:

I've never been that great at articulating what I hear in words but somehow the Tidal streaming doesn't sound as good to me as local streaming. Maybe it's the content and honestly I just setup Tidal yesterday so not much listening via the NDS. But local streaming sounds better to my ears. There's a missing ambience to the Tidal sound. It's smaller and shut-in compared to the music coming from my NAS.

I actually prefer Europaradio (1,000 Kbps Lossless Uncompressed FLAC) on vTuner over Tidal. I have no issues with dropouts with either.

I didn't buy an NDS for Tidal or any other streaming service because I've never expected much from them. In my car with a Mark Levinson stereo, I find satellite radio unlistenable.

This is sort of like upsampling to me. How can you take something and make it look or sound better than the original by "filling in" the gaps? This is artificial and I don't particularly like it. I think Naim is trying to satisfy the demand and be competitive since other companies are offering it but I think it's great that Naim will only release an update once they are satisfied with the sq - it's one of the reasons I stay with Naim.

Arun

Arun, can you explain how you set up the Europaradio 1000 on vTuner?

AndyL posted:

charlesphoto posted:

Or you get a Sonore microRendu with a decent power supply, use the Lumin or Kazoo app for Tidal, and blow away the NDX in sound quality for a 1/7th of the price. Plenty of options out there....

another option being Tidal via Audirvana+ on a Mac Mini

with Damien working to improve your sound quality for free 

Which sounds excellent and damned close to local files although I'm sure it will on Naim gear at some point too 

I think we need to be clear about what we are expecting from the FW update and what issues we are having with Tidal, which I would suggest fall into 2 categories: Dropouts and SQ.

I no longer suffer with dropouts but would also welcome improved SQ as I listen to Tidal quite a bit these days. The immediate problem must however be the dropout issues that some still appear to be suffering with. So the question is, does the new FW update address the dropout issue or SQ or both? A secondary question is, if the answer is both, then is one fix delaying the issue of the FW update?

I know the beta testing team might not be able to answer, but Trevor, can you tell us what the situation is? It's been a very, very long time coming.

Who knows, we may all be back to spinning silver (or even black) discs by the time the new FW update is launched! 

Richard Morris posted:

Arun Mehan posted:

I've never been that great at articulating what I hear in words but somehow the Tidal streaming doesn't sound as good to me as local streaming. Maybe it's the content and honestly I just setup Tidal yesterday so not much listening via the NDS. But local streaming sounds better to my ears. There's a missing ambience to the Tidal sound. It's smaller and shut-in compared to the music coming from my NAS.

I actually prefer Europaradio (1,000 Kbps Lossless Uncompressed FLAC) on vTuner over Tidal. I have no issues with dropouts with either.

I didn't buy an NDS for Tidal or any other streaming service because I've never expected much from them. In my car with a Mark Levinson stereo, I find satellite radio unlistenable.

This is sort of like upsampling to me. How can you take something and make it look or sound better than the original by "filling in" the gaps? This is artificial and I don't particularly like it. I think Naim is trying to satisfy the demand and be competitive since other companies are offering it but I think it's great that Naim will only release an update once they are satisfied with the sq - it's one of the reasons I stay with Naim.

Arun

Arun, can you explain how you set up the Europaradio 1000 on vTuner?

Hello Richard,

I believe it's been posted before on the forum but if you email me (see my profile), I can provide you instructions.

Arun

Arun, a search doesn't seem to show any previous info on the forum, and I'd imagine a few people would be curious. Could you post the method on the forum, to save piecemeal emails, or is there something that'd break forum rules involved?

Arun send me the instructions, which are as detailed here once you have logged in.

The stream for Europajazz 1000 is http://www.europaradiojazz.org/stream.flac.m3u

As Arun advised I set the media type to Windows Media.

However the station (and others I have added) is not showing up on the naim iPhone app. I can Airplay from the website to a Mu-so, of course.

Once added the screen then says:

'Your added station EJ will appear on your Naim Uniti after it is next updated. You may update your Naim Uniti immediately by following the Manual Update instructions that came with your Naim Uniti.'

I wonder if this message is out of date (the website is rudimentary) or this only works with a Uniti? 

Added the station via Naim.vtuner.com (didn't know you could do that!) and found it in the added stations folder in the Naim app.

Unfortunately, despite specifying windows media stream at 1000kbps when adding it and double checking the stream address, it shows up as 320kbps AAC when playing on my 172. So can't make any comparisons with other streaming sources.

Just listening to Tidal HiFi at work and all of a sudden it stopped and started buffering which got me thinking... I wonder how man Tidal issues are related to sub-optimal networks or internet connections?  I use Tidal on my PC at work and do occasionally experience dropouts or buffering issues but do share the network with 19 other people and we do have the odd issue.  Whereas i've never had any issues at home where I stream Tidal Hifi through my NDX.  Maybe the firmware isn't to blame?  

Hi most of the Tidal issues have been down to duplex latency ... That is round trip time between the streamer , Tidal media server and streamer again . This can vary under load from the Tidal (or any server) as well load on the network route. The current firmwares are quite sensitive to this, however the firmwares that are in development for the streamers are more tolerant to latency here... and dropouts will be significantly improved.

This issue is not directly related to network bandwidth other than in extreme scenarios of congestion. RTD (round trip delay) is a normal TCP/IP network characteristic, and in short the clients need to be able to tolerate it over the typical operating environment with the supported applications. Typically you can mitigate RTD by having larger TCP window segmentation memory and/or well as having larger amounts of application buffer memory and/or improving the speed and efficiency of the client TCP/IP state machine responsiveness of the client.. I believe Naim ate focussing on the latter. The two former options tend to increase application delay and latency.

Simon

Dave***t posted:

Added the station via Naim.vtuner.com (didn't know you could do that!) and found it in the added stations folder in the Naim app.

Unfortunately, despite specifying windows media stream at 1000kbps when adding it and double checking the stream address, it shows up as 320kbps AAC when playing on my 172. So can't make any comparisons with other streaming sources.

Thanks to Richard for posting the instructions.

That's interesting  Is there a limitation in the 172 compared to the dedicated streamers? How does it sound to you?

I do hope Naim can improve the sq with Tidal (and other streaming services) but I have enough music to keep me occupied. Radio Paradise at 320 is enough to introduce me to new music let alone my friends who keep introducing me to new stuff all the time.

Arun

To those that say the firmware update is about nice to have add ons, I beg to differ. I have most of my hi-res stuff ripped to ALAC and as the last FW update was nearly a year ago I've effectively been living with a faulty SuperUniti for all that time, as I get the irritating loud snap/click between most tracks. I'm amazed its taking so long to rectify this.