Tidal on my NAIM app doesn't work properly...

No such problems here on my 272 [@mention:12266460308121230]. Streaming Tidal hifi with no dropouts since day one. 

Are you streaming hifi? Does it make any difference if you stream at a lower quality? 

Yes.

No.

I have had some sporadic issues with Tidal over the past 2 years but overall very happy; that being said I did suffer some exceptional dropouts yesterday and today. At some point I was promoted to reenter my credentials, seems to work now.

I had no problems up until about three months ago, when I dismantled and packed away prior to moving house.

I have set up again and been running for two days. Today is worse than yesterday...

I also had prompts to re-enter my login details, which I did. Didn't resolve the issue.

Searching the site, I see that there were widespread Tidal dropout problems last year. I assume, reading your post and struggling with my own playback, that this is now re-occurring.I have emailed NAIM regarding the issue and await some reassurance either from Richard on here or from NAIM tech help, in my email...

Mike1951 posted:

I have made sure that I am running 4.4 on my Android app and on my ND5XS. I have tried deleting and reloading the app on my mobile.

There is no problem with my internet connection - TV reception and mobile is perfectly OK.  I am getting a "strong" 144mbps signal. I am hardwired from the router to the ND5XS and there are no other Wifi signals nearby.

Radio station playback is fine. USB playback is fine.

Tidal playback suffers from constant dropout. Eventually, the selected track disappears completely from the mobile screen and just displays "Tidal" with the logo...

Is this a general problem, and what is NAIM doing to sort it?

Mike, I run the naim app on a iPad with a ND5XS and I have the problem you describe on occasion. I can stream all day long from Tidal the majority of the time without any problems.  Then on other occasions the track/album stream will disappear with the just the 'Tidal' logo displaying as you described. At times I can just reselect the album/song and it will restart. Other times I have cleared cache and/or turned off the ND5 and then turned backed on and that would allow me to go back to streaming without issue. 

I would like it to be 100% perfect all the time but that probably is never going to happen. So on the one or two occasions it has been a real bother I have switched to listening to my own CD's via UPnP streaming from my NAS or internet radio. 

I don't know if it has anything to do with the NAIM app or just network load or other mysteries in the WWW. 

Cleared the cache. OK for a while but soon back to the same problem. This suggests that the fault is with the app?

In any event, I'd appreciate at a reply from a NAIM rep that they are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it, at the least.

You would do well to call or email Naim directly, so that they can try to help you. You are unlikely to get a meaningful response by posting on the Forum. 

You think?

HH is right. That is the advice Naim give here frequently. They don't routinely read all forum posts, so if you just post here, they may see it or they may not.

best

David

Mike, I don't do Tidal (I can't actually, but that's another issue entirely down to BT infrastructure).  Either way, you should contact Naim support, either by e-mail or phone.

Thank you Richard. Irony is so hard to convey in the written word...

Hi Mike, yes may well be down to latency which several  Naim network devices  are sensitive to, especially when playing lossless FLAC over the web (i.e. FLAC). Please do contact Naim support... they might suggest you try a wired  Ethernet connection, as that has different network timing characteristics compared to wifi.. and that just might help, or they might even suggest something else..........

With a 4Mbps down and 450kbps up link if no one else is using the internet should be sufficient for a Tidal via a loccal Ethernet connection. 

Latency has no direct bearing on bandwidth, but the business of your internet connection when it is noticeably bandwidth constrained can push latency up. Latency is the time it takes a packet to travel from A to B, and is ultimately the time between your streamer and the Tidal cloud media server can become important.

Simon, Mike did state he was "hardwired from the router to the ND5XS."  

I do not use wireless on my ND5XS and also have a 'wired  Ethernet connection.'

Simon are you saying that latency is/can also occur when the audio system is directly wired? ......or were you indicating that this has to do with wireless streaming?

Thanks

Hi all. I've been searching for posts on this topic for 3 days now. I've had pretty good playback (uninterrupted) from Tidal for the last 2 odd months. However 3 days ago, any track I play on Tidal stops after a few seconds of playing (usually under a minute). The screen on my NDS says "Connecting" at the instant the music stops and then I have to press play to start again. 

My setup is all wired (Modem-switch-NDS) and I've not had any internet speed issues (consistently above 80-100 Mbps as shown on my Speedtest app on an iPad). Upnp plays fine.  

I didn't post on this topic yet since I left for my summer vacation the day after the problems started... 

not sure if it's Tidal related or something more ominous.

seakayaker posted:

Simon, Mike did state he was "hardwired from the router to the ND5XS."  

I do not use wireless on my ND5XS and also have a 'wired  Ethernet connection.'

Simon are you saying that latency is/can also occur when the audio system is directly wired? ......or were you indicating that this has to do with wireless streaming?

Thanks

He did indeed I missed that.... he could try wifi instead ... it might just make a difference strange as it may seem... without doing a WireShark trace, it's hard to be categoric,  it's likely to be either an old firmware or some sort of latency issue. Just a thought when he used the word 'wired' I hope he meant Ethernet and not a consumer work around like zpowerline Adapters which are not really a wired solution.

Yes, the latency is determined end to end, and so is built up from your local LAN whether it be Ethernet or a WLAN, your router and switch, your ISP access and then the  ISP backhaul through its management and protection regulatory monitoring layer, to a peering point, and then across the internet to cloud hosting service provider and then to the media servers themselves... and the data is going backwards and forwards across the link, and as the Naim streamers (the new Unitis are different) have a relatively small buffer, this end to end timing in both directions becomes important. When many people consider bandwidth and latency they forget the uplink paraders which typically are slower than the downlink.... and latency is NOT the same as access bandwidth... so people claiming X Mbps access bandwidth unless very contented, or extremely low won't have much bearing...

One last observation for tonight.

Albums selected randomly from Tidal' s home page play perfectly.

Dropouts only happen when trying to play from my own playlists or albums...

I'll post again once I've exchanged emails with NAIM and found a solution.

PS to that. About to turn in for the night and had a thought. 

What if I tried deleting and re-loading my albums into my Tidal account? Might something have occurred that left it's effect on each data file without effecting anything else, and a simple process of replacement solve the problem?

This would mean replacing every single album and tune in my lists - a huge job but if it worked at least by the end of it I'd have my Tidal back...

So I deleted and replaced one album.

Played it back,  no dropouts.

Just before trying another deletion, I played back the first number from one of my play lists.

No dropouts. We're on the third number. Still no dropouts. 

I'm guardedly optimistic but if this sustains it looks like I've hit on the solution, but don't ask me for the technical explanation.  I'll leave that to others here.

Random or what?  

I don't know if this helps our cause but I thought I would mention that yesterday I signed up for Tidal using the Naim App to play through my NDX, this gives you a 90 day trial. I tried to play some tunes using Tidal. The interface works fine and you can browse their extraordinary library of music. When you go to play however, it is a different story. Whenever I attempt to play the NDX says, "Connecting ..." and then it says "Can't play, skipped track".  The Tidal app offers three "quality settings" which you can access through the Settings on the App: Normal, High and HiFi. I would imagine that when you sign up using the 90 day trial they would put their best food forward and give us HiFi. However I tried all three and none of these work.

I contacted Tidal and they predictably responded with this: 

Thank you for contacting TIDAL Member Support

Please contact the NAIM Support Team as they developed the interface with the TIDAL backend and should be able to help resolve your issue.

Here are the particulars of my system:

1) Firmware version of NDX is 4.4.00 according to the https://www.naimaudio.com/updates webpage this is the current version

Hi Jack, have you managed to stream via the standard Tidal app?

the first thing I check in case of a Tidal dropout (on the NDX) is whether I have a similar behavior in the Tidal app...

Suspect this is the recent Tidal update which now Naim will need to ensure they match and check.

For me Tidal within the a Naim app constantly hangs and gets confused, artwork will sometimes go blank on the Atom showing a track played before and the app just goes into meltdown, after a while it catches up so sort of lag issue.

Yesterday in my normal display the app just zoomed in on the album artwork to the extent I could not touch the play, fwd,back or volume, ended up using the remote which made matters worse, 3 mins later it caught up but ended up restarting the Naim app.

Come on guys this is beyond embarrassing it's app development 101, you need to be validating new Tidal, Spotify, etc updates with your Naim app.

"Come on guys this is beyond embarrassing "

Couldn't agree more. 

Obsydian posted:

Suspect this is the recent Tidal update which now Naim will need to ensure they match and check.

For me Tidal within the a Naim app constantly hangs and gets confused, artwork will sometimes go blank on the Atom showing a track played before and the app just goes into meltdown, after a while it catches up so sort of lag issue.

Yesterday in my normal display the app just zoomed in on the album artwork to the extent I could not touch the play, fwd,back or volume, ended up using the remote which made matters worse, 3 mins later it caught up but ended up restarting the Naim app.

Come on guys this is beyond embarrassing it's app development 101, you need to be validating new Tidal, Spotify, etc updates with your Naim app.

Hi Obsydian,

For Spotify they provide Connect code as precompiled modules that they certify and we have no access to. For TIDAL we test to the best of our ability using our own staff and the Beta testers - if there were a baseline issue that breaks a particular baseline function that we are able to identify in testing then we wouldn't release that code.

Can you provide replication steps to support@naimaudio.com and we will look into the issues that you are having?

Best

Phil

Hey all,

I have used TIDAL via my NDS since it was implemented and up until recently had next to no issues with it.  However, just before I went on holiday in July, I could barely get through an album without it stopping or dropping out; iradio worked fine, everything else on my network worked fine and TIDAL over their app on the iPad worked fine.  I figured the long holiday system shutdown would sort the issue; of course, I was wrong and finally gave up and contacted my dealer.

He suggested switching the NDS to wireless playback and then back to wired.  I did this and lo and behold, TIDAL has worked flawlessly since.  It's worth mentioning that we have a UnitiQute in the back room which worked fine the whole time over its wireless connection.  I'm no expert but can only conclude that getting the NDS to restart its network connections cleared some kind of issue that was causing the problem.  

It's worth mentioning that this problem occurred on the old and new versions of the app.  

Might be worth a try.

Cheers,

Ian

Ian F posted:

Hey all,

I have used TIDAL via my NDS since it was implemented and up until recently had next to no issues with it.  However, just before I went on holiday in July, I could barely get through an album without it stopping or dropping out; iradio worked fine, everything else on my network worked fine and TIDAL over their app on the iPad worked fine.  I figured the long holiday system shutdown would sort the issue; of course, I was wrong and finally gave up and contacted my dealer.

He suggested switching the NDS to wireless playback and then back to wired.  I did this and lo and behold, TIDAL has worked flawlessly since.  It's worth mentioning that we have a UnitiQute in the back room which worked fine the whole time over its wireless connection.  I'm no expert but can only conclude that getting the NDS to restart its network connections cleared some kind of issue that was causing the problem.  

It's worth mentioning that this problem occurred on the old and new versions of the app.  

Might be worth a try.

Cheers,

Ian

Thanks for the suggestion, I will give that a try when I get home from work this evening and see what happens over the next few days.